Dorothy Wellesley (Dorothy Violet Wellesley) Biography

British poet, born at Heywood Lodge, White Waltham, Berkshire; she was privately educated. Her numerous collections of verse include Early Poems (1913), Lost Lane (1925), Matrix (1928), Lost Planet (1942), and Desert Wells (1946). From 1934 onwards she was W. B. Yeats's close friend; some of his letters to her were published as Letters on Poetry in 1940. He valued her work highly for the ‘passionate precision’ with which it displayed her intuitive understanding of the mystical philosophy he had laboured to expound. She was generously represented in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). Fusions of observational and imaginative elements give much of her verse its compelling vividness. Her weaker work tends towards historical and mythological portentousness. A collected edition entitled Early Light was produced in 1955. She was the wife of Lord Gerald Wellesley, who became the Seventh Duke of Wellington in 1943. Her other publications include the biography Sir George Goldie: Founder of Nigeria (1934) and Far Have I Travelled (1952), a volume of autobiography.