Homesickness often brings fellow expats together and drives the creative impulse, prompting exiled artists to pick up the brush, or poets the pen. So the unveiling this week of a new tribute to the burning 20th-century Irish talent who wrote of the land of his birth from the English capital should not be a surprise.
What is perhaps surprising is how long it has taken. William Butler Yeats was, after all, not just a great literary star in Ireland. He can also claim to be the only Nobel prize-winning, full-time poet raised in England.
Now, after a campaign waged by fans of Yeats’s work, including Sir Bob Geldof and the actors Ciarán Hinds, Jeremy Irons, Sinéad Cusack and Ruth Negga, the new public sculpture they believe is well overdue will finally celebrate the poet’s London life.
WB Yeats in 1911. Photograph: George C Beresford/Getty Images
The sculpture, to be unveiled on Tuesday by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is the work of the British sculptor Conrad Shawcross, and its arrival in a leafy London square will mark the end of a slow process of recognition in the area where Yeats grew up and lived into his 50s. The west London enclave of Bedford Park is also the place where he created some of the most popular poems ever written in the English language, among them The Lake Isle of Innisfree. In British polls of favourite lyrical works, it is Yeats who regularly scores the most hits.
As Geldof has put it: “Bedford Park is where the national poet understood what it was to be impoverished, alien, exiled, became obsessed with a woman who would haunt his life and give rise to the greatest poetry of the 20th century. Surrounded by his extraordinary family and his radically revolutionary neighbours, Bedford Park whipped the beautiful young poet into the maelstrom of poetry that would give rise to a nation.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/04/wb-yeats-sculpture-bedford-park-london
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