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William Butler Yeats

(1865 – 1939)

W B. Yeats, Irish poet and playwright and one of the greatest lyric poet Ireland has produced and was one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, Yeats was the acknowledged leader of the Irish literary renaissance. Son of the painter John Butler Yeats, William studied painting in Dublin (1883-86). As a boy he attended school in London and spent vacations in County Sligo, Ireland, which was the setting for many of his poems. He became fascinated by Irish legends and by the occult. His first work, the drama Mosada (1886), reflects his concern with magic, but the long poems in The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) voiced the intense nationalism of the Young Ireland movement.

Yeats’s verse can be divided into two periods, the first lasting from 1886 to about 1900. The poetry of this period shows a debt to , Spenser, Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelites: Yeats edited William Make’s works in 1893, and his own Poems were collected in 1895 ‘kats’s efforts to foster Irish nationalism were inspired for years by Maud Gonne, an Irish patriot for whom he had a hopeless passion. In 1898 with Lady Augusta Gregor); George Moore, and Edward Martyn he founded the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin; their first production (1899) was Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen (written 1889-92). Yeats helped produce plays and collaborated with Lady Gregory on the comedy The Pot of Broth (1929) and other plays. The Irish Literary Theatre produced several of Yeats’s plays including Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), and after the Abbey Theatre was opened  The Hour Glass (1904), The Land (f Heart’s Desire (1904), and Deirdre (1907). Yeats’s writing prose tales were collected in The Celtic Twilight (1893) and in the symbolic Secret Rose (1897). Yeats’s poetry deepened, as he grew older. In the verse of his middle and late years he  renounced his early transcendentalism; his poetry became stronger, more physical and realistic. A recurring theme is the polarity Between extremes such as the physical and the spiritual, the real and the imagined. Memorable poems from this period included The Second Coming, The Tower, and Sailing to Byzantium. Yeats initiated his second period in such volumes as In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green’ Helmet and Other Poems (1910). In 1917 he married Georglie Hyde-Lees, and his occultism was encouraged by his wife’s automatic writing. His prose work A Vision (1937; privately printed 1926) is the basis of much of his poetry in The Wild Swans at Goole (1917) and Four Plays for Dancers (1921).