Francis Ledwidge

Francis Edward Ledwidge ( born August 19, 1887 in Slane, County Meath, † July 31, 1917 in Boezinge ) was an Irish poet and nationalist.

Life

Ledwidge worked after he left school at the age of 13, as a farm laborer and Handwerkgsgehilfe. He was active in unions in 1906 and was from 1913 to 1914 the secretary of the Meath Labour Union in Slane. Ledwige was set politically to the left and at the same time also an Irish nationalist. He tried unsuccessfully a division of the Gaelic League in his hometown to set up. But he was with his brother Joseph founder of the department of the Irish Volunteers in Slane. Despite its nationalist attitude he joined the 5th Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers on 24 October 1914. He fought until the Battle of Gallipoli and on the Western Front in France. He died in 1917 near the village of Boezinge north of Ypres.

Work

Francis Ledwidge used as a teenager every opportunity that presented itself to write poems, which appeared in 1901 in the local newspaper Drogheda Independent. In 1912 he sent a notebook Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany Lord Dunsany published the poems under the name and had many friends in the literary circles of Dublin. Lord Dunsany Ledwidge encouraged to write and made ​​him known in Dublin with William Butler Yeats. Dunsany prepared the only independent book publishing Ledwidges before in his lifetime ' Songs of the Fields' (1915 ). A second volume, the book that well fit right under the title "Songs of Peace ' (1917 ) in the Irish Literary Revival movement had died as Ledwidge in preparation. The second band was followed by an equally supervised by Dunsay third volume under the title ' Last Songs ' (1918). Ledwidge is known for the description of rural scenes in his poems are found in his last poems but then also delicate echoes of the war. Edward Marsh took Ledwidges works on in his collection Georgian Poetry 1913-15 (1915 ). Dunsany gathered the scattered poems in many magazines Ledwidges in "The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge ' (1919).

Swell

• Obituary of Prof. Lewis Chase in The Cornhill Magazine 1917 p 696-704. With an autobiographical letter Ledwidges to Chase dated June 6, 1917.

Full text at Internet Archive.

Works

• Songs of the Fields, 1915, the Internet Archive.
• Songs of Peace, 1917.
• Last Songs, in 1918, the Internet Archive.
• The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwige, 1919, the Internet Archive.