It’s well known that Yeats’s, Lake Isle of Innisfree, was inspired by Thoreau’s Walden escape from industrialised society, a theme central to the ethos of semi-pastoral Utopian artist’s colony and first garden-suburb, Bedford Park, where John Butler Yeats found for his family a Land of Heart’s Desire that transcended the grimy, bustling Victorian metropolis.

Less well understood is just how much Bedford Park’s alternative/Bohemian culture, its progressive spirit, and the development of Yeats’s early poetic voice, all owed to American Transcendentalism, to Emerson and to Whitman’s poetry (virtually the suburb’s set text)… the same transcendentalism that led Yeats to a lecture by HS Olcott at the Bedford Park Club after which Yeats’s life was changed utterly.

Irish poet, musician, & literary critic, Cahal Dallat, has lived within a few blocks of the Yeats family’s two Bedford Park homes all of his adult life, fascinated by the locale that allowed the young Willie Yeats’s poetic soul to take off on so many centrifugal routes, and is currently embarked on a project to create a major contemporary artwork a few yards from Yeats’s London boyhood home celebrating Yeats and the uniquely questing spirit of Bedford Park, a project that’s gaining widespread support from Yeatsians worldwide acknowledging London’s role in the development of Yeats’s uniquely Irish genius, and from English suburbanites suddenly, happily acknowledging Yeats’s unique contribution to London life and English literature.