Rhymers' Club

The Rhymers' Club was a group of London-based male poets, founded in 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys.

[1] They met at the London pub ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ in Fleet Street and in the 'Domino Room' of the Café Royal.

The group as a whole matched quite closely Yeats' retrospective idea of 'the tragic generation', destined for failure and in many cases early death.

The Second Book of the Rhymers' Club appeared two years later in 1894, published by the recently merged Elkin Mathews and John Lane.

[3] By the time Arthur Ransome wrote his Bohemia in London in 1907, the group had already passed into legend: "... the Rhymer's Club used to meet, to drink from tankards, smoke clay pipes, and recite their own poetry".