AE

AE, pseudonym of George William Russell, (born April 10, 1867, Lurgan, County Armagh, Ire.—died July 17, 1935, Bournemouth, Hampshire, Eng.), poet, artist, and mystic, a leading figure in the Irish literary renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Russell took his pseudonym from a proofreader’s query about his earlier pseudonym, “AEon.”

After attending the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, where he met the poet William Butler Yeats, Russell became an accounts clerk in a drapery store but left in 1897 to organize agricultural cooperatives. Eventually he became editor of the periodicals The Irish Homestead (1904–23) and The Irish Statesman (1923–30). In 1894 he published the first of many books of verse, Homeward: Songs by the Way. His first volume of Collected Poems appeared in 1913 and a second in 1926. He maintained a lifelong interest in theosophy, the origins of religion, and mystical experience. The Candle of Vision (1918) is the best guide to his religious beliefs.

At the turn of the 20th century, Russell was considered by many to be the equal of Yeats, but he did not continue to grow and develop as Yeats did. He was prolific and versatile, but many critics found his poetry facile, vague, and monotonous, with “rather too much of the Celtic Twilight” in it.