Life
1859-1946; abandoned engineering in 1886 to write; met Yeats at house
of William Morris; visited Bedford Park and expressed delight at first
Irish family of his acquaintance; founder and member of Poets of the Cheshire
Cheese early in 1891, with Yeats, Rolleston, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson,
and others; m. Grace Little [infra]; issued Welsh Ballads and Other Poems (1898); edited The Golden Treasury of Longer Poems (1921 &
Edns.) and numerous literary works incl. poems of Mallory, Campion, Dekker,
Vaughan, Pope, Byron, Herrick and Burns; ed. Modern English Essays,
4 vols. (1922).
[ top ]
Works
Welsh ballads and Other Poems (London: D. Nutt 1898) x,
177 pp. [20cm]
[ top ]
Notes
W. B. Yeats, review of Welsh Ballads, The Bookman (April
1898), ‘... the magical beryls in which we see life, not as it is,
but as the heroic part of us, the part which desires always dreams of
emotions greater than any in the world, and loves beauty and does not
hate sorrow, hopes in secret that it may become. [...] Because a great
portion of the legends of Europe, and almost all of the legends associated
with the scenery of these islands, are Celtic, this movement has given
the Celtic countries a sudden importance, and awakened some of them to
a sudden activity.’ (Cited in John Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose,
Vol. 1, 1970, Pref., p.71; printed in Vol. 2.)
W. B. Yeats wrote to Katharine Tynan, ‘I have met some literary people over here with the usual number of bon mots and absence of convictions that characterise their tribe. One however has no bon mots and several convictions - a Welsh man Ernest Rhys editor of the “Camelot Series” (John Kelly, ed., Letters, ed., vol. 1, 1986, p.15).
Arthur Quiller Couch, ed., Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1918 (new ed. 1929), Ernest Rhys, 1874 [err.]
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, (Harlow: Longmans 1988); remarks that Rhys produced some Fiona Macleod-type fantasies such as The Fiddler of Carne (1896), using an 18th cent. vagrant musician to tell a fable of art; also The Whistlng Maid (1900), a Welsh romance. BL 2.
W. B. Yeats: A. N. Jeffares cites Yeats’s note in Wind
Among the Reeds: ‘Professor Rhys, who considers the bristleless
bar a symbol of darkness and cold, rather than of winter and cold, things
it was without bristles because the darkness is shorn away by the sun.
it may have had different meanings ...’; and note that the corresponding
note in Collected Works (1906) ‘If one reads Professor Rhys’s Celtic Heathendom by the light of Professor Frazer’s Golden
Bough ...
[ top ]
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)