The Gonne-Yeats Letters 1893 - 1938, Always Your Friend

Abstract

When he was 21 years old, W.B. Yeats fell in love with a young Irish actress, Maud Gonne. Despite her refusal to marry him, he continued to write poems that ensure her lasting fame. The majority of his letters to Gonne were destroyed by the British when they ransacked her Dublin home, but those that remain show how deeply distressed he was when she married John MacBride. Yet he celebrated her beauty, shared her devotion to the Irish cause, interested her in mysticism, shared visions with her and entered into a spiritual marriage with her. Her own letters reveal her tempestuous private life involving a love affair with Lucien Millevoye, a French politician and journalist and father of their two children.

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