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William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, the son of a well -known Irish
painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents
were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to contin ue his
education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the
Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement
against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Vic torian period, which
sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned
Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in
Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish
revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her
passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903
and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman,
Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish
independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation
in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his
American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was
strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but
Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. He had a life-long
interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he
remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued
to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922,
he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright (he was one of
the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest
poets²in any language²of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in
1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73.

"You were silly like us: your gift survived it all." So wrote W. H. Auden in
"In Memory of William Butler Yeats," as he paid homage to one of his very
few superiors among twentieth-century poets. William Butler Yeats was
indeed a strange man, deeply intelligent and yet committed to spiritualism
and the supernatural, philosophically questing and yet emotionally enslaved
William Butler for decades to a woman who never encouraged his affections, aloof and
Yeats aristocratic and yet riven by and giving gifted expression to the most basic
of human urges. Yeats's gift not only survived his personal peculiarities, it
drew upon them to nurture and sustain itself, and in the process fashioned
the single greatest body of English-language poetry written in the last
hundred years.

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William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865. He was the first of six children
of John Butler Yeats, the son and grandson of Protestant clergymen, and Susan (Pollexfen) Yeats,
whose father was a co-owner of a milling and shipping businesses. John Butler Yeats was admitted
to the bar in January 1866, but a year later he abandoned his law career and moved to London,
where his wife and infant children would join him several months later, in order to become an
artist. Mrs. Yeats and her children would frequently return to Ireland for extended stays²one of
which lasted two years²with her family in County Sligo. This area on the western coast would be a
refuge for the poet, in both reality and imagination, throughout his life. Yeats attended grammar
school in London, where his family continued to live until 1880, when the loss of his income from
land holdings forced his father to move the family back to Ireland. He spent the next three years at
Erasmus High School in Dublin, but at the completion of his studies, owing to his poor marks in
classics and mathematics, he could not qualify for the entrance examinations to Trinity College.
Therefore, he enrolled as a student at the Metropolitan Art College, partly in response to his
father's view that everyone, whether intending to be an artist or not, should have some art
training. One of his classmates was a young Ulsterman named George Russell, who would become
one of Yeats's closest friends and, under his pen name of AE, a well-known poet. While a student at
the Art College, Yeats began seriously to write poetry, and achieved his first important publication
in 1885, when two short lyrics of his were printed in the u

 .

During this period, Yeats began to read widely in Irish poetry and translations of ancient Gaelic
sagas, and made other contacts that would be decisive in shaping his thought and art. He
befriended the Fenian leader John O'Leary, whose name, decades later, he would incorporate in the
refrain of "September 1913": "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone/It's with O'Leary in the grave." At
O'Reilly's home, Yeats was introduced to a number of other Irish nationalists. In 1886, his friend
and fellow poet Katherine Tynan brought him to his first seance, an experience that he found
unnerving, but one which sparked his lifelong interest in the occult and the supernatural. With
several friends, he founded the Dublin Hermetic Society, a theosophical organization devoted to the
spiritualist notions of the controversial Madame Blavatsky.

In 1887, the Yeats family relocated in London, where Yeats joined the Esoteric Circle of the
Theosophic Society. Asked to leave the group two years later, he was initiated into the Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization dedicated to Rosicrucianism and ritual magic. In
London, he also met fellow Irishmen Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, and came to know a
number of English poets, including older, established figures such as William Morris and William
Ernest Henley, and his own contemporaries, such as Arthur Symons and Lionel Johnson. In January
1889, bearing a letter of introduction from John O'Leary, a young woman named Maud Gonne
knocked on Yeats's door and changed his life forever. Tall, red-haired, and striking, she was an
intense Irish nationalist with little patience for dreaminess or ambiguity. Over the years, she would
value Yeats as a friend and argue with him over political commitment, but she could never
reciprocate the passionate attachment that transfixed him from the start. Over the years, she
would consistently turn down his repeated proposals²his attachment would endure her bearing a
child by one man and marrying another²and she would remain the unattainable beloved who
inspired and inhabited many of his finest poems.

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In 1886, Yeats published his first book, a dramatic poem entitled ã
. The following year, he
edited an anthology called  


  , and the year after that a volume
of   

 

 . In 1889 came his first appearance in book form as a
lyric poet, the genre in which he would achieve his greatest triumphs, with  



  
. From the beginning, he showed himself to be a master of his craft. His early
work was imbued with a haunting beauty, a soreness of heart born of a fundamental loneliness of
spirit, and an idealistic longing to transcend the miseries and imperfections of the mundane world.
These qualities would remain constants in his poetry as it went through many profound changes in
the following years. In these early lyrics, his longings often took the form of a rather simplistic but
beautifully expressed escapism, as in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," and he turned frequently to Irish
myths and sagas as counterweights to the tawdriness of actual existence, as in "Who Goes with
Fergus?" "When You Are Old," adapted in part from a sonnet by the sixteenth-century French poet
Pierre de Ronsard, is one of the finest and most famous of Yeats's early lyrics; it became
significantly better known when lines from it were used in a Xerox television commercial in the
1960s. "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland," which works some subtle changes upon Yeats's
escapist theme, was one of the most accomplished and satisfying of the poems of this first phase
of his career. But even his best poetry of this period is apprentice work when compared to the
masterpieces that were still years in the future.
The year 1896 proved to be another turning point in Yeats's life, whose changes were once again
precipitated by the making of new friends. One of these was Lady Augusta Gregory, the forty-four-
year-old widow of a wealthy landowner. A playwright herself, she was interested in the prospect of
an indigenous Irish arts movement. Her country estate at Coole would become a second home and
a refuge for Yeats for many years, until her death in 1932. He had always been interested in poetic
drama and had already published early examples in  

 (1892) and 


 
u
  (1894). With Lady Gregory and others, he founded the Irish Literary Theatre, out of
which came the Abbey Theatre, which would grow into an Irish national treasure. In that same
year of 1896, Yeats met John Millington Synge, who would succumb to Hodgkin's disease in 1909
at the age of thirty-eight. With Yeats's encouragement, Synge sharpened his dramatic talents and
produced the comic masterpiece 


   (which, when presented by the
Abbey in 1907, provoked riots for its purported slurs on Irish womanhood) and the tragic
dramas 
 ! and u  
! 
.

Yeats's own poetry continued to develop. Its language grew more colloquial, its rhythms more
muscular, and its treatment of his obsessive themes more complex. All of these features were
exhibited in "Adam's Curse" (1903), in which his hopeless passion for Maud Gonne is intertwined
with the larger theme of the necessity to labor for anything of true value; this haunting work has
been called the first undeniably great poem that Yeats ever wrote. Also in 1903, Maud profoundly
shocked and dismayed Yeats with her sudden marriage to Major John MacBride, a man Yeats
regarded as a boor and brute, and the antithesis of everything he believed in. MacBride would
mistreat her and the couple would separate, although he would later distinguish himself as one of
the heroes of the Easter Rising of 1916, the armed insurrection at the Dublin Post Office that
signaled the beginning of the modern Irish independence movement.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, Yeats's verse demonstrated a new strength and
directness, as seen as such poems as "A Coat" and "The Fisherman." In "The Fascination of What's
Difficult," he implicitly ascribes this change to his forced immersion in the business of running the
Abbey Theatre²and thus, by extension, to the necessity of grounding himself in the real world. He
also turned to more explicit treatments of contemporary public and political themes. After the bitter
satire of "September 1913" came two poems in 1916 that explored the mysteries of heroism and
self-sacrifice. One was "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," one of several poems that Yeats
wrote to commemorate the loss of Lady Gregory's son in the First World War. The other was
"Easter 1916," a profound meditation and tribute, whose tone, from its opening line, reflects the
authority of a great artist writing at the height of his powers. The expansion of subject matter was,
of course, dictated by the great rush of enormous events²the Irish Insurrection, the World War,
the Russian Revolution²swirling around the poet and inhibiting access to ivory towers. The
changes in style and angle of approach came about, at least in part, through Yeats's association
with Ezra Pound, who had served Yeats in a secretarial capacity for extended periods in 1913 and
for several years thereafter. In a remarkable act of deference born out of a dedication to his art
over his ego, Yeats, established by then as one of the foremost poets of the age, had made himself
a pupil of sorts to the brash young American expatriate, seeking to modernize his art and to
remain relevant to evolving times and expectations.

In others of his poems, Yeats approached public subjects more obliquely, whether through the
focus of traditional mythologies, as in "Leda and the Swan," or those of his own devising, as in
"The Second Coming," which incorporated his theory of history as series of two-thousand-year
cycles, each of which represented a reaction against its predecessor. This and many other symbolic
dimensions of his thought were elaborated in the strange, dense prose work that he called"
#
  (1925). He also fixed upon Byzantium²the Byzantine Empire, with its seat in Christian
Constantinople, especially in the fifth and sixth centuries²as the high point of civilization, a time
and a place in which the physical, intellectual, and spiritual strands of life came together in an
organic unity never equalled before or since. In "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats posits this place of
his imaginings as a haven in which the soul can escape from physical decay and emotional
confusion into an artistic and spiritual immortality.

These years saw great changes in Yeats's life as well as his art. In October 1917, after proposing
once more to Maud Gonne and then, with equal unsuccess, to her daughter Iseult, Yeats married
an English lady named George Hyde-Lees. Georgie, as she was called, delighted her husband on
their honeymoon by attempting²or, in the opinion of some, faking²automatic writing, and she
later functioned as a spirit medium. They had two children, Anne in February 1919 (whose birth
occasioned the splendid poem "A Prayer for My Daughter") and William Michael in August 1921. In
1922, after the establishment of the republic, Yeats was invited to become a member of the first
independent Irish Senate, an office he held until 1928. And in 1923, his stature as a man of letters
was given international recognition when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

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On the heels of the difficult, symbolic verse that had come to
dominate in his work, Yeats in the early 1930s made yet another
change of direction and entered the last phase of his poetic career, that
of the "wild old wicked man." After a lifetime of seeking to transcend
the infirmities of the flesh and the eccentricities of the heart, he now
embraced these inescapable components of the human condition and
celebrated them in such vigorous, direct, and powerful poems as
"Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop," "Politics," and "John Kinsella's
Lament for Mrs. Mary Moore." Another late masterpiece was "The
Circus Animals' Desertion" (1938), in which, after a remarkable
overview of his poetic career and the impulses that inspired some of
William Butler Yeats his greatest works, he resigns himself to the need to "lie down where
all the ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

After more than a decade of declining health, Yeats died of heart failure on January 28, 1939, on
the French Riviera, and was buried in the coastal village of Rocquebrune. In 1948, his remains
were brought back to Ireland and reburied, according to his wishes, in the shadow of Ben Bulben
mountain in County Sligo. On his headstone appears his self-composed epitaph, the conclusion of
his poem "Under Ben Bulben": "Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!"

Even while he was still alive, Yeats had come to be regarded as the greatest English-language poet
of the twentieth century, and now, more than sixty years after his death, as the century is
completed, no serious rival has emerged to challenge that assessment. In no other poet of the
century do we find such consistent excellence, such lyrical and emotional intensity, and such
probing and satisfying treatment of the great issues of human life. Yeats constantly revised and
improved his work. Although he remained committed to traditional verse forms throughout his life,
within those structures he experimented constantly with line length, with rhythm, and especially
with off-rhyme, and in doing so opened up technical possibilities for generations of poets. His work
became a lifelong quest to reconcile the separate and often troubling aspects of existence. Most
writers reach a point at which they find the answers that they want, and their work then often
becomes repetitious and complacent. For Yeats, the great questions remained unanswered²note
how many of his poems end with a question mark²and he continued to write great poetry to the
very end of his long and rich career.

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 The Bibliography includes an extended list of writings about William Butler
Yeats. Continue your Web Explorations by visiting Yeats Links.