William Butler Yeats (Dublin, Ireland, 1865 - 1939, Roquebrune, France)
Poems Written in Discouragement, 1913
Printed ink on paper, 17 x 14 cm (6 11/16 x 5 1/2 in.)
Macknight Room
Commentary
William Butler Yeats is among the most important poets of the twentieth century. Isabella Stewart Gardner held many Irish authors in high regard and counted Yeats’s collaborator, Lady Augusta Gregory, among her personal friends. She placed this book—which was written in the wake of a rejected proposal to build a museum of modern art in Dublin—alongside other works by Gregory in the Macknight Room.