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The Tales Of Red Hanrahan: W.B. Yeats
The Tales of Red Hanrahan are imitation folk stories marinated in pre-Raphaelitism and self pity. There were a lot of writers turning out this sort of thing in the 1890s but only Yeats went on to become a major 20th century poet. The Hanrahan stories have charm, but are mostly of interest because of Hanrahan's appearance as a semi-mythical figure in Yeats' great mid-life crisis poem "The Tower". The Hanrahan of The Tower is an earthier, more dynamic figure than his earlier incarnation- but then "old lecher" wasn't a phrase that existed in the lexicon of the Rhymer's Club.
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I keep forgetting that's where Anne McCaffrey got the name of one of the founding colonists of Pern. I read her science fiction years before I'd even heard of Yeats.
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