Poetic justice: WB Yeats’s time in London to be celebrated at last

The sculpture Enwrought Light by Conrad Shawcross, erected as a tribute to WB Yeats in Bedford Park, where he grew up and lived until his 50s. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

Homesickness often brings fellow expats together and drives the creative impulse, prompting exiled artists to pick up the brush, or poets the pen. So the unveiling this week of a new tribute to the burning 20th-century Irish talent who wrote of the land of his birth from the English capital should not be a surprise.

What is perhaps surprising is how long it has taken. William Butler Yeats was, after all, not just a great literary star in Ireland. He can also claim to be the only Nobel prize-winning, full-time poet raised in England.