The Candle of Vision

George William Russell (1867-1935) who wrote under the pseudonym AE, was an Anglo-Irish supporter of the Nationalist movement in Ireland, a critic, poet, and painter. He was also a mystical writer, and centre of a group of followers of theosophy in Dublin, for many years. He worked many years for the Irish Agricultural Organiation Society (IAOS), an agricultural co-operative movement founded by Horace Plunkett. When Plunkett needed an able organiser, W. B. Yeats suggested Russell, who became Assistant Secretary of the IAOS. Russell was editor from 1905-1923 of The Irish Homestead, the journal of the IAOS, and infused it with vitality that made it famous half the world over. He was also editor of The Irish Statesman from 1923 until 1930. Amongst his other works are The Nuts of Knowledge: Lyrical Poems Old and New (1903), By Still Waters: Lyrical Poems Old and New (1906), Imaginations and Reveries (1915), AE in the Irish Theosophist (1937) and The National Being: Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity (1916).