William Allingham

William Allingham (1824–1889) was an Irish poet born in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, where he spent his early working life as a customs officer. He published his first collection in 1850 and went on to Day and Night Songs (1854) and the long verse narrative Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), a portrait of the relations between landlords and tenants.

He later moved to England, edited Fraser's Magazine from 1874 to 1879, and married the illustrator Helen Paterson, who drew many of the pictures for his children's verse. He is remembered above all for the fairy poems, chiefly "The Fairies" ("Up the airy mountain"), and for the Donegal ballads and lyrics that W. B. Yeats chose for Sixteen Poems (1905) and the later Rhymes for the Young Folk.