YEATS W. B.: (1865-1939) Irish Poet & Dramatist, Nobel Prize winner for Literature, 1923. A brief A.L.S., W B Yeats ...

YEATS W. B.: (1865-1939) Irish Poet & Dramatist, Nobel Prize winner for Literature, 1923. A brief A.L.S., W B Yeats, one page, 8vo, Euston Place, London, n.d. ('Saturday', pre-1915), to [Sir Hugh] Lane. Yeats' letter comprises one line 'With pleasure - Tuesday'. With blank integral leaf. A letter of interesting association. VG £100-150 Hugh Lane (1875-1915) Irish Art Dealer & Collector who established Dublin's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, the first known public gallery of modern art in the world. In October 1913 Yeats privately published fifty copies of Poems Written in Discouragement, 1912-1913 with the Cuala Press. The poems had been inspired by the controversy surrounding Sir Hugh Lane's proposal to establish a modern art gallery in Dublin and the rejection of the plan by the Dublin Corporation. Yeats placed the Lane episode as the third in a sequence of public controversies which had stirred his imagination, and it also signified a new phase in the relation between Yeats and Ireland.