Francis Ledwidge A Life of the Poet

Although he died at twenty-nine, having lived to see only one volume of his poems in print, today, 100 years after his death, the life of the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge continues to fascinate successive generations of readers. Born in Slane, County Meath, in 1887, Ledwidge endured a childhood of ferocious hardship before leaving school at fourteen to work as a farm labourer, copper miner, road worker and union organiser. Throughout this time he produced an extraordinary body of exquisite lyric poetry. He burst onto the literary scene just before the First World War, in which, although a devoted and active Irish Nationalist, he was killed in Flanders in the uniform of the British Army. Widely viewed as a dichotomy, this led to decades of suspicion and neglect in some quarters before Alice Curtayne published her acclaimed biography of the poet in 1972, rightly restoring his reputation. Detailing the remarkable life, loves and tragic death of an exceptionally gifted Irish poet, this classic biography also offers a memorable insight into the life and politics of Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century.