TIME TRAVEL | A. E. (George William Russell), Irish Futurist Poet

George William Russell ("A.E.")

George William Russell was an Irish poet, born in Lurgan, Ulster on April 10, 1867. He used as his pseudonym the letters A.E., signifying the diphthong "AE" as in Aeon. 

The following notes are based primarily on the entry for A.E. by JC in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and the entry by JE and JC on A. E.'s friend Joseph James O’Neill.

Much of A.E.’s work reflects a mystical agenda that he shared with William Butler Yeats. In 1886 they helped found the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society. 

A. E.'s first book was a collection of supernatural tales, The Mask of Apollo, and Other Stories, published by Whaley in Dublin and Macmillan in London in 1904.

I have a copy of the first edition of The Mask of Apollo, illustrated by hand by my mother, Hilda van Stockum, in 1956, when we had left Ireland (having lived in the Dublin area for three years 1951-54 and in Paris for one, 1954-55) and were living again in Montreal. I am thinking of publishing the book with my mother's drawings. The book itself is now in the public domain, but not my mother's drawings.

Another book by A.E., published 18 years later, is described by JC as "more coherent" than The Mask of Apollo. It is called The Interpreters (Macmillan, 1922), set in a great City in the indeterminate future, as a long-lived Pax Aeronautica dissolves into factional warfare involving great Airships; those captured in this schism then engage in philosophical debates.

In another, later book set in a future Ireland, The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (Macmillan, 1932), two supernatural beings hauntingly invoke a vision of a world less abandoned to materialism. Their seductive discourse draws the protagonists to "the margin of the Great Deep", as Monk Gibbon puts it. Gibbon’s long, informative essay on A.E.’s work introduces The Living Torch (collected, Macmillan, 1937), a posthumous volume of nonfiction. "The House of the Titans", the long narrative tale that dominates The House of the Titans and Other Poems (a chapter in Macmillan’s 1934 collection), inhabits similar territory.

A.E. wrote an introduction to Joseph James O'Neill's book Land Under England (1935). A. E. takes the book to be a Satire on Hitlerian totalitarianism, an impression strengthened on the appearance of Day of Wrath (1936), a Future-War novel which describes the destruction of civilization in 1952 by advanced aircraft following a coalition between Germany, Japan and China (see Pax Aeronautica; Yellow Peril). 

A. E. died at 68 in Bournemouth, Dorset, July 17, 1935, at the height of his powers.