GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL

George William Russell

George William Russell

Introduction

George William Russell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh. His family shifted to Dublin when he was eleven. He was educated at Rothmans School and the Metropolitan School of Art, where he started a lifelong companionship with William Butler Yeats. He begun employed as a draper's clerical assistant, and then worked numerous years for the Irish Agricultural Organization Society (IAOS), a farming co-operative action based by Horace Plunkett in 1894. The two came simultaneously in 1897 when the co-operative action was eight years old. Plunkett required an adept organizer and W. B. Yeats proposed Russell, who became Assistant Secretary of the IAOS. (Byrne, 1960)

He composed under the pseudonym occasionally in writing AE or A.E.), was an Irish nationalist, author, reviewer, detractor, bard, and painter. He was furthermore a mystical author, and centre of an assembly of followers of theosophy in Dublin, for numerous years.

Every facet of the Irish Renaissance - literary, creative, political, and economic - is indebted to A.E... Although W.B. Yeats was a larger bard, J.M. Synge a larger dramatist, and Jack B. Yeats a larger decorator, no one of A.E.'s young individual countrymen could competitor his versatility or agree his religious stature. He is often recalled as a bard and as one of those factual mystics who have searched by functional endeavors to convey some feel of the religious perfection they beheld into the life of this world. A.E. dwelled up to the 'word of power' he provided to the novelist L.A.G Strong - 'Seek on soil what you have discovered in heaven'. George William Russell (1867-1935) - A.E. - was seer, bard, decorator, co-operator, political thinker, reporter, reviewer, public speaker, and the conscience of the Irish nation. His significance in the literary, political, and economic life of up to date Ireland ...