35 Facts About Francis Ledwidge

Francis Edward Ledwidge was a 20th-century Irish poet.

Francis Ledwidge befriended the established writer Lord Dunsany, who helped with the publication of his works.

Francis Ledwidge was killed in action at Ypres in 1917.

Francis Ledwidge was elected to a local government post and helped organise the local branch of the Irish Volunteers, while Dunsany edited the first volume of his poetry and helped him secure publication for it.

Francis Ledwidge was selected as one of twelve prominent war poets - and the only Irish one - for the exhibition Anthem for Doomed Youth at the Imperial War Museum in London in 2002.

Francis Ledwidge has been memorialised at events at the Slane museum, in Ypres and in Inchicore, Dublin, with his official centenary commemoration at Slane in 2017 and his work set to music and performed by Anuna at the former Inchicore barracks the same year.

Francis Ledwidge, known to his family as "Frank", was born at Janeville on the eastern edge of Slane, in County Meath, Ireland, the eighth of nine children in a poverty-stricken family.

Francis Ledwidge left the local national school aged thirteen, and while he continued to educate himself, he worked at what work he could find.

Francis Ledwidge was known for his connections with Sinn Fein.

Francis Ledwidge was published with some regularity in the Irish Weekly Independent and Sunday Independent from mid-1909.

Yeats and Oliver St John Gogarty, with whom Francis Ledwidge became further acquainted.

Francis Ledwidge was one of the founder members in 1906 of the Slane branch of the Meath Labour Union.

Francis Ledwidge familiarised himself with the writings of James Connolly and, despite the Vatican's condemnations of Marxism, Ledwidge found no contradiction between Roman Catholicism and socialism.

Francis Ledwidge did manage to act as a founding member with his brother Joseph of the Slane Branch of the Irish Volunteers, a paramilitary force created in response to the founding of the Ulster Volunteers, who had sworn to resist Home Rule for Ireland even if it meant civil war.

Some have speculated that he went to war because his sweetheart Ellie Vaughey had found a new lover, John O'Neill, whom she later married, but Francis Ledwidge himself wrote, quite forcefully, that he could not stand aside while others sought to defend Ireland's freedom.

Francis Ledwidge seems to have fitted into Army life well, and rapidly achieved promotion to lance corporal.

Francis Ledwidge was dismayed by the news of the Easter Rising, writing a lament for his friend Thomas MacDonagh, one of the Rising's leaders who was executed in May 1916.

Francis Ledwidge grew disenchanted with the war effort, and was court-martialled and demoted for overstaying his furlough and being drunk in uniform.

Francis Ledwidge gained and lost stripes over a period in Derry, and then, returned to the front, received back his lance corporal's stripe one last time in January 1917 when posted to the Western Front, joining 1st Battalion, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, part of 29th Division.

Francis Ledwidge continued to write when feasible throughout the war years, though he lost many works, for example, in atrocious weather in Serbia.

Francis Ledwidge sent much of his output to Lord Dunsany, himself moving on war assignments, as well as to readers among family, friends and literary contacts.

The poems Francis Ledwidge wrote on active service reveal his pride at being a soldier, as he believed, in the service of Ireland.

Francis Ledwidge often wondered whether he would find a soldier's death.

Francis Ledwidge killed, blown to bits; at Confession yesterday and Mass and Holy Communion this morning.

Francis Ledwidge was first buried at Carrefour de Rose, and later re-interred in the nearby Artillery Wood Military Cemetery, at Boezinge,.

In 2002, Francis Ledwidge was selected as one of twelve representative World War I soldier poets by the Imperial War Museum, the only Irish poet chosen.

The official national commemoration for Francis Ledwidge was held at the birthplace cottage at the edge of Slane on 24 June 2017, with Ireland represented by Minister for European Affairs, Helen McEntee, joined by four members of Francis Ledwidge's family, an Irish Army Brigadier General, a Garda Assistant Commissioner, various politicians, the Belgian ambassador, the UK defence attache, and many locals.

Francis Ledwidge was writing poetry from childhood, and from age 14, he would routinely send poetry to a number of newspapers in Ireland.

The only work published in book form during Francis Ledwidge's lifetime was the original volume Songs of the Fields, containing fifty poems, which was very well received.

The 122 poems from the three volumes were assembled into a collection, The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge, released in 1919, which went through at least three editions.

Francis Ledwidge wrote of working on a play, The Crock of Gold, but no Francis Ledwidge drama has yet been published or performed.

Some of Francis Ledwidge's poetry was set to music by the British composer and songwriter Michael Head, most notably in the song cycle published in 1920, "Over the rim of the moon".

Central to the literal argument is our theory that Francis Ledwidge meets criteria set out for War Poets and identified by Marsh's friend and fellow academic Robert H Ross, who in 1965 published a study attempting to explore the Georgians.

Francis Ledwidge's politics are described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as nationalist as well as left-wing.

Francis Ledwidge was the subject of an RTE documentary entitled Behind the Closed Eye, first broadcast on 18 January 1973.