William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was the greatest Irish poet of the twentieth century and a leader of the Irish literary revival. A founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a senator of the Irish Free State and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1923, he moved from the dreamy lyrics of his youth to the powerful poems of The Tower and his last years.
Works
The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, The Wild Swans at Coole, Michael Robartes and the Dancer
Dublin, London and Sligo
Yeats was born in 1865 in Sandymount, near Dublin, the son of the painter John Butler Yeats. The family moved between London and Ireland, and the young poet spent long holidays with his mother's family in County Sligo, in the west of Ireland, whose landscapes, folklore and fairy legends haunted his imagination.
He studied art briefly in Dublin, but turned to poetry. In London he joined the Rhymers' Club and became interested in mysticism, magic and the occult. His early collections, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), drew on Irish mythology.
Maud Gonne and the Abbey Theatre
In 1889 he met Maud Gonne, a tall, beautiful English-born revolutionary devoted to Irish independence. He fell hopelessly in love and proposed to her several times; she always refused. She inspired many of his poems and his play Cathleen ni Houlihan.
With Lady Augusta Gregory, whose house at Coole Park became his refuge, and the playwright John Millington Synge, he worked to create a national literature in English. In 1904 they founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which staged their plays and, in 1907, provoked riots with Synge's The Playboy of the Western World.
The mature poet
The Easter Rising of 1916 and the execution of its leaders inspired his poem Easter, 1916. In 1917 he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, and bought a Norman tower, Thoor Ballylee, near Coole. After independence he served as a senator of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928.
He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. His later collections, The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Last Poems, are considered his greatest. He died in the south of France in January 1939; in 1948 his body was brought back to Drumcliff, in County Sligo, as he had wished.
Anecdotes
Automatic writing
Shortly after their marriage in 1917, Yeats's wife Georgie began to produce automatic writing, messages she said were dictated by spirits. Over several years the couple filled thousands of pages, from which Yeats drew the strange system of history and personality set out in his book A Vision.
Under Ben Bulben
In his last poem, Under Ben Bulben, Yeats asked to be buried in Drumcliff churchyard, at the foot of the mountain, and composed his own epitaph, which asks the horseman passing by to cast a cold eye on life and on death. The words are carved on his gravestone.
Frequently asked questions
What are W. B. Yeats's most famous poems?
The Lake Isle of Innisfree, When You Are Old, Easter, 1916, The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium and The Wild Swans at Coole.
Who was Maud Gonne?
An Irish revolutionary and actress whom Yeats loved for many years and who inspired many of his poems; she refused all his proposals.
When did Yeats win the Nobel Prize?
In 1923, the first Irish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.