WB Yeats’s to be celebrated in London at last

W B Yeats, Nobel Laureate winning Irish poet who was raised in England, will have a statue unveiled to him today in Bedford Square, London. Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Atkinson, will unveil the tribute, which is the work of British sculptor Conrad Shallcross. As reported in the Guardian: 

'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.”

Organisers of the project claim the sculpture will be a fitting gateway to the park, which was the world’s first garden suburb, with its carefully conserved architecture from the Arts and Crafts movement.

English Heritage had originally suggested a blue plaque should go up on the house in Blenheim Road, Chiswick, west London where the young Yeats met the inspirational, radical figure of Maud Gonne, and co-founded the Irish Literary Society. Yeats’s parents had brought the family over to Victorian England to settle in the village near the Thames that was being built “for communal happiness” by Dublin-born Jonathan Carr. Soon the park, which had its own inn, stores, church, school of art and social club, had drawn in an eclectic, bohemian crowd and become a magnet for creative activism.

Now, to misquote the line from the poet’s famous Easter, 1916, “a shimmering beauty will be born” when Williams reveals Shawcross’s tower of flashing metal. The artwork was partly funded by a £25,000 award from the Royal Academy, as well as by public donations, and support from the London Borough of Hounslow and the Irish embassy.'