Profession: playwright

Yeats was hugely influential on the Irish literary revival (along with O’Casey and Synge) and on a number of 20th-century poets, including Pound, who acted as his secretary and taught him fencing. He helped found and run the Abbey Theatre, his close friend Synge also involved. He had known Morris, was astonished at Wilde’s perfectly-formed spoken sentences, was a friend to Masefield and Chesterton, and corresponded with notables from Shaw to Betjeman and Eliot to Lutyens. He told Woolf that he and de la Mare composed thumbnail poems; and successfully kicked the marauding Crowley out of the Isis Urania temple.

Edmond de Goncourt was met at school, aged 11, and Baudelaire at 18 (their long close friendship surviving a 3-year break as they quarreled over an actress). Younger poets revered Banville and were keenly supported, including Mallarmé, Verlaine (who called him his dear master), and Rimbaud (who as an unknown 16-year-old sent him some poems, and became both friend and lodger). Hugo showered praise on Banville, Vigny was both friend and admirer, Gautier encouraged him (and died the day after Banville’s last visit). Nadar and Murger (who collaborated with Banville on a novel) were among a gang of fast friends.

Auden (particularly close, an inspiration and later collaborator), Spender and Day Lewis were friends from university, though the four were never the tight-knit group of popular imagination. Betjeman and MacNeice (and Anthony Blunt) had co-edited a school magazine. Eliot published him, Priestley sold a house to him, and Britten composed music for him. Thomas was a BBC colleague and drinking-partner. He befriended Berryman (who wrote an elegy after his death) on a transatlantic liner, and Leigh Fermor in Athens, and bravely asked Yeats if he’d ever seen the mysterious spirits his wife claimed to get messages from.