George William Russell

George William Russell (10 April 1867 – 17 July 1935) who wrote under the pseudonym Æ (sometimes written AE or A.E.), was an Irish nationalist, writer, editor, critic, poet, and painter. He was also a mystical writer, and centre of a group of followers of theosophy in Dublin, for many years.

Life
Russell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh. His family moved to Dublin when he was eleven. He was educated at Rathmines School and the Metropolitan School of Art, where he began a lifelong friendship with William Butler Yeats. He started working as a draper’s clerk, then worked many years for the Irish Agricultural Organization Society (IAOS), an agricultural co-operative movement founded by Horace Plunkett in 1894. The two came together in 1897 when the co-operative movement was eight years old. Plunkett needed an able organiser and W. B. Yeats suggested Russell, who became Assistant Secretary of the IAOS.

He was an able lieutenant and travelled extensively throughout Ireland as a spokesman for the society, mainly responsible for developing the credit societies and establishing co-operative banks in the south and west of the country whose numbers rose to 234 by 1910. The pair made a good team, with each gaining much from the association with the other. As an officer of the IAOS he could not express political opinions freely, but he made no secret of the fact hat he considered himself a Nationalist. During the 1913 Dublin Lock-out he wrote an open letter to the Irish Times criticizing the attitude of the employers, then spoke on it in England and helped bring the crisis to an end. He was an independent delegate to the 1917-18 Irish Convention in which he opposed John Redmond's compromise on Home Rule.

Russell was editor from 1905-1923 of The Irish Homestead, the journal of the IAOS, and infused it with the vitality that made it famous half the world over. His gifts as a writer and publicist gained him a wide influence in the cause of agricultural co-operation. He was also editor of the The Irish Statesman from 15 September 1923 until 12 April 1930. With the demise of this paper he was for the first time in his life out of a job, and concerns were raised that he could find himself in a state of poverty, as he had never earned very much money from his paintings or books. Unbeknownst to him meetings were held and collections organized and later that year at Plunkett House he was presented by Father T. Finlay with a cheque for £800. This enabled him to visit the United States the following year, where he was very well received all over the country and his books sold in large numbers.

He used the pseudonym "AE", or more properly, "Æ". This derived from an earlier Æ'on signifying the lifelong quest of man, subsequently shortened.

His first book of poems, Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894), established him in what was known as the Irish Literary Revival, where Æ met the young James Joyce in 1902 and introduced him to other Irish literary figures, including William Butler Yeats. He appears as a character in the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Joyce's Ulysses, where he dismisses Stephen's theories on Shakespeare. His collected poems appeared in 1913, with a second edition in 1926.

His house at 17 Rathgar Avenue in Dublin became a meeting-place at the time for everyone interested in the economic and artistic future of Ireland. His interests were wide-ranging; he became a theosophist and wrote extensively on politics and economics, while continuing to paint and write poetry. Æ claimed to be a clairvoyant, able to view various kinds of spiritual beings, which he illustrated in paintings and drawings. The keynote of his work may be found in a motto from the Bhagavadgita prefixed to one of his earlier poems I am Beauty itself among beautiful things.

He moved to England after his wife’s death in 1932, and died in Bournemouth in 1935. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.

Poetry

 * Voices of the Stones (MacMillian 1925)
 * Homeward Songs by the Way (Dublin: Whaley 1894)
 * The Earth Breath and Other Poems (NY&London: John Lane 1896)
 * The Nuts of Knowledge (Dublin: Dun Emer Press, 1903)
 * The Divine Vision and Other Poems (London: Macmillan; NY: Macmillan 1904)
 * By Still Waters (Dublin: Dun Emer Press 1906)
 * Deirdre (Dublin: Maunsel 1907)
 * Collected Poems (London: Macmillan 1913) (2nd. edit. 1926)
 * Gods of War, with Other Poems (Dub, priv. 1915)
 * Imaginations and Reveries (Dub&London: Maunsel 1915)
 * The Candle of Vision (London: Macmillan 1918)
 * Autobiography of a Mystic (Gerrards Cross, 1975), 175pp.;
 * Midsummer Eve (NY: Crosby Gaige 1928)
 * Enchantment and Other Poems (NY: Fountain; London: Macmillan 1930);
 * Vale and Other Poems (London: Macmillan 1931)
 * Songs and Its Fountains (London: Macmillan 1932)
 * The House of Titans and Other Poems (London: Macmillan 1934)
 * Selected Poems (London: Macmillan 1935).

Novels

 * The Interpreters (1922)
 * The Avatars (1933)

Essays

 * AE in the Irish Theosophist (1892-97)
 * The National Being : Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity (1916)
 * The Candle of Vision (1918)
 * Song and Its Fountains (1932)