A Terrible Beauty

W.B. Yeats’s poignant words have come to immortalise the complex legacy of the Easter Rising, 1916. At this time of upheaval in Ireland, poetry gave voice to a generation. Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’ sits alongside selected works of other major poets of the era, including Pádraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett, who were executed for their parts in the Rising.