William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939) was an Irish poet and playwright who stood at the centre of the Irish Literary Revival and is regarded as one of the foremost poets in English of the twentieth century. He co-founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, served as a senator of the newly established Irish Free State, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. [1] His work moved from early Celtic romanticism to a spare, hard-edged modern style in collections such as The Tower. [2]
Early life and education
Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 at Sandymount near Dublin, the son of the painter John Butler Yeats. The family divided its time between London and Ireland, and his childhood summers in County Sligo, his mother's home county, supplied the landscape and folklore that saturate his early poetry. [1]
He attended the Godolphin School in London and The High School in Dublin, and then studied art at the Metropolitan School of Art, later the National College of Art and Design, before abandoning painting for literature. His first published poems appeared in the mid-1880s. [2]
The Irish Literary Revival
Yeats collected and reworked Irish folk material in volumes such as The Celtic Twilight, and his early poetry, including "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and The Wanderings of Oisin, drew on Irish myth. He was closely involved with the nationalist cultural movement, and with Lady Augusta Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Irish Literary Theatre, which developed into the Abbey Theatre in 1904. [3]
He wrote and staged plays for the Abbey, among them Cathleen ni Houlihan, and managed it through controversies including the riots that greeted J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. His long, unreturned love for the nationalist Maud Gonne shaped much of his lyric poetry. [1]
Later poetry and public life
From about 1910 Yeats's style tightened, shedding decorative language for a more direct and often bitter idiom, encouraged in part by his contact with Ezra Pound. The Easter Rising of 1916 produced "Easter, 1916," with its refrain about a terrible beauty being born, while the aftermath of the First World War produced "The Second Coming." [2]
He married Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917. Her experiments with automatic writing fed the elaborate historical and mystical system he set out in A Vision, which underlies the symbolism of his late poems. He served two terms in the Senate of the Irish Free State from 1922 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what the Academy called inspired poetry giving expression to the spirit of a whole nation. [4]
Final years and legacy
His late collections, including The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), contain the Byzantium poems and much of the verse on which his reputation rests. He spent his final winters in the south of France and died at Menton on 28 January 1939; his remains were later reinterred at Drumcliff in County Sligo, beneath the epitaph he had written for himself. [1]
Yeats shaped modern poetry in English and gave Ireland a national theatre and a literary self-image; the Abbey Theatre continues, and his phrases have passed into common speech. [3]
