A.E.

   Pseudonym used by Irish poet George William Russell (1867-1935) for all his writing. In 1886 he and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) helped found the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and much of his work reflects a mystical agenda - not very coherently in the supernatural tales assembled in The Mask of Apollo, and Other Stories (coll 1904), but with very much more force in The Interpreters (1922), a philosophical fiction set in an idealized venue. More elegiacally and more concretely, in The Avatars: A Futurist Fantasy (1932), set in a future Ireland, this agenda comes to life in the form of two supernal beings who hauntingly invoke a vision of a world less abandoned to materialism, and thus draw the protagonists to the margin of the Great Deep, as Monk Gibbon puts it in his long and informative essay on A.E.'s work which introduces The Living Torch (coll 1937), a posthumous volume of nonfiction.