By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
What connects Marianne Faithfull, the actress Emma Thompson, the German electronic group Tangerine Dream, and the British comedian and quiz host, Alexander Armstrong? The answer is that they have all recorded musical settings of ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, one of W. B. Yeats’s great early poems. ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ was published in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems in 1889, when Yeats was still in his mid-twenties.