William Allingham is best known today for a few poems in anthologies, of which "The Maids of Elfin-Mere," "The Fairies," and "The Winding Banks of Erne" are the three most frequently republished. Among students of English literature, however, he is remembered as the author of a significant body of short lyrics, especially those evocative of his native Ireland; a confidant and memorialist of Victorian literary greats--Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, and D. G. Rossetti, among many others; and a major influence on Yeats and other twentieth-century Irish poets.

Allingham was descended from Protestant Englishmen who had immigrated to Ireland from Hampshire in Elizabethan times. He was born in the town of Ballyshannon, by the river Erne, in county Donegal, on 19 March 1824, the eldest son of William and Elizabeth Crawford Allingham. His formal education ended by the time he was fourteen, and for the next eight years he worked in the...