Discover the Best Books Written by W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish literary establishment who helped to found the Abbey Theatre. In his later years, he served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. A Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent, Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland, educated in Dublin and London, and spent childhood holidays in County Sligo. 

He studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. He was influenced by TS Eliot, John Keats, William Wordsworth, William Blake, and many more. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, lasting roughly from his student days at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

From 1900 his poetry grew more physical, realistic, and politicized. He moved away from the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with some elements, including cyclical theories of life. He had become the chief playwright for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897 and, early on, promoted younger poets such as Ezra Pound. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. His major later works include 1928's The Tower and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, published in 1932.

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland. His father, John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier, linen merchant, and well-known painter who died in 1712. Benjamin Yeats, Jervis's grandson, and William's great-great-grandfather, had in 1773 married Mary Butler of a landed family in County Kildare. Following their marriage, they kept the name, Butler. Mary was of the Butler of Neigham (pronounced Nyam) Gowran family, descended from an illegitimate brother of The 8th Earl of Ormond.

At the time of his marriage, William's father, John Yeats, was studying law but would later pursue art studies at Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. William's mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from Sligo, from a wealthy merchant family who owned a milling and shipping business. Soon after William's birth, the family relocated to the Pollexfen home at Merville, Sligo, to stay with her extended family. The young poet considered the area his childhood and spiritual home. 

Its landscape became, over time, both personally and symbolically, his "country of the heart." So did its location by the sea; John Yeats stated, "by marriage with a Pollexfen, we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs." The Butler Yeats family was highly artistic; his brother Jack became an esteemed painter. His sisters Elizabeth and Susan Mary—known to family and friends as Lollie and Lily—became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement.

Yeats was raised a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, which was undergoing a crisis of identity at the time. While his family broadly supported the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage. It informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum that to understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of W.B.Y." 

Yeats' childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy. The 1880s saw the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement; the 1890s saw the momentum of nationalism, while the Irish Catholics became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments had a profound effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity significantly influenced the creation of his country's biography.