A Terrible Beauty: Poetry of 1916

The Easter Rising's 1916 legacy is captured through Yeats’s stark, lasting poetic revelation.

‘A terrible beauty is born’

WB Yeats’s poignant words have come to immortalise the complex legacy of the Easter Rising, 1916. The poetry that emerged at this time of upheaval in Ireland gave voice to the thoughts of a generation. Yeats’s poem, ‘Easter 1916’, sits alongside selected works of other major poets of the era. These include Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett, who were exec...