William Butler Yeats was born in County Dublin on June 13, 1865. Due to the demands of his career as an artist, Yeats's father moved the family to London when Yeats was still young, but he spent summers in County Sligo, in Western Ireland. When Yeats was fifteen, his family moved back to Dublin, where he attended the Metropolitan School of Art.
Yeats's first work was published in the Dublin University Review in 1885. What is generally considered to be his first mature work, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Works, came out in 1893. After The Wanderings of Oisin, which was based on an ancient Irish saga, Yeats never attempted another long poem and confined himself to the lyric form.
Yeats grew interested in the occult at an early age. He visited a famous theosophist, Madame Blavatsky, and joined the Theosophical Society. Theosophy holds that all beliefs are a part of a larger spiritual system, and all hold some measure of the truth. Yeats attended many séances, beginning in 1886.
Madame Blavatsky later asked Yeats to become a member of the inner circle of London’s Theosophical Society as part of its Esoteric Section. However, Yeats was more interested in magical experiments and astrology, and was eventually expelled from the Theosophists. He later joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a cult that also included famous figures such as Aleister Crowley and Bram Stoker. His involvement in this cult may have led to his interest in theatre, as the cult often performed rituals using props. His mystical interests, many of which coalesced during his time in this cult, included a newfound belief in the magic of poetry and words themselves, which he believed can transport the reader to higher planes of understanding, much like a magic spell.
In 1889, Yeats met the love of his life, an Irish revolutionary named Maude Gonne (1866-1953). Unfortunately, Maude did not return his ardor, and after refusing his marriage proposals three times, she married Major John MacBridge in 1903. Collections of poetry from this time include The Rose (1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).
Yeats's early poetry drew on ancient Irish epics as well as the contemporary nationalist movement that was gaining force in Ireland. In the Ireland of 1880s and 1890s, the two were sometimes inseparable. Many members of the Gaelic League, formed to prevent the disappearance of the Irish language and rehabilitate its classics, were also members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a precursor organization to the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Yeats was fascinated by folktales, and, under the tutelage of George Russell and Thomas Hyde, he published Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry in 1888. In 1897, Yeats met Lady Gregory, another member of what was termed the Gaelic Revival, and she convinced him to start writing drama with Irish subject matter. Together with George Moore and Edward Martyn, the two set up The Abbey Theatre, Ireland's national theater, in Dublin in 1904. Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan, a nationalist play personifying Ireland as a woman, was performed on the opening night.
In 1917, Yeats bought Thoor Ballylee, a Norman stone tower in County Sligo, near Coole Park. He spent the following summer with Maude Gonne's family, and proposed to her daughter, Iseult, but was turned down. The same year, he married Georgie Hyde-Lee. His wife shared his interest in the occult and claimed a gift of "automatic writing," in which her hand was directed by a divine force. Together, the two produced The Vision, a notebook of spiritual thoughts, in 1933.
As well as writing poetry and plays and continuing to serve on the artistic board of the Abbey Theatre, Yeats became a member of the Seanad, the Irish senate, from 1922-25. He served on the committees that helped to create coinage for the new state. He left in disgust when the governmental organization was split in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War (1923-24).
Yeats remained political as he grew older, though much of his status as the key poet of the Irish Revolution of the early 20th century is based on myth. Having described his political sensibilities as "a continual quarrel and a continual apology," Yeats did identify as an Irish nationalist, hoping for the unification of war-torn Ireland—but he also hated conflict, and he published his revolutionary poem, "Easter 1916," near the end of the Irish Revolution. 1919 found Yeats considering moving away to Japan or Italy to escape the guerrilla warfare that was tearing apart his country.
As Yeats grew older, he developed a friendship with Ezra Pound, a poet who drew him away from his mystical, lyrical style into something drier and sparer. Arguably his most famous collection, The Tower (1928), contains political poems as well as a more modernist return to mythological topics in poems like "Leda and the Swan." Yeats became increasingly political in his old age, publishing a collection called Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1921, which includes his famous "Easter, 1916" in which he describes the birth of modern Irish nationalism with the famous phrase, "a terrible beauty is born." The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) contains poems that focus on Yeats's own estate at Coole Park—the winding stair being the stair at Thoor Ballylee. His later poems, especially "Under Ben Bulben," express his desire to be buried there. After his death, he was buried in Sligo, and he rests under the epitaph "Cast a cold eye on life, on death; horsemen, pass by!"
"Adam's Curse" is a poem by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats. Originally published in the 1903 collection In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age, the poem uses the scene of a conversation on a summer night as a vehicle to...
William Butler Yeats's "Byzantium" originally appeared in his 1932 collection Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems. In this enigmatic work, an unidentified speaker enters a transcendent, fantastical space—the city of Byzantium. Here he...
Cathleen Ni Houlihan, written collaboratively by W.B Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1901, is a play centered around the 1798 Irish Rebellion. In the early 20th century, Ireland was still under colonial rule, and many longed for an independent Irish...
William Butler Yeats published "The Circus Animals' Desertion" in a collection called Last Poems, which was published in 1939—the year of his death at age 70. Yeats was a legendary Irish poet who wrote profoundly about the Irish fight for...
“Easter, 1916” is one of Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s most famous poems. The poem was written about an event known as the “Easter Rising.” On Easter Sunday of 1916, a group of Irish Republicans who wanted an independent Irish republic...
William Butler Yeats first began publishing collected volumes of poetry in the late 1880’s. He was still regularly publishing new and updated compendia until just a few years before his death in 1939. Scholars, academics, fellow poets and...
"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is a poem by W.B. Yeats, written in 1918 and published the following year. The sixteen-line, iambic tetrameter elegy is written from the perspective of a fighter pilot in World War I. This speaker is Irish, and...
William Butler Yeats's "An Irish American Forsees His Death" was first written in 1918 and published in 1919 as a part of Yeats' poetry collection, The Wild Swans at Coole. Told from the perspective of the eponymous Irish airman, the poem is his...
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. It was written in 1888 when Yeats was living in London. It was first published in the National Observer in 1890 and reprinted in Yeats’s collection The Countess...
The last years of Yeats' life were defined by two conflicting concepts. At the one hand, he felt distain for the in his eyes failure of the democratic process in Ireland and the destruction of Irish nobility. On the other hand, he underwent a...
Michael Robartes and the Dancer is a book collection of 15 poems. The book and thus the poems were written between the years 1914 and 1919, before it was published in 1920. Later on, the book has been republished various times, including the...
An Irish poet and perhaps the most representative of the modernist poets, W.B. Yeats has offered much to the English literary canon. He is known not only for his contributions to British but also Irish literature and was an irreplaceable part of...
The Rose is a collection of twenty-two poems that W.B. Yeats published in 1893. It was only his second lyrical collection, but contains many of his famous mythological poems. At this point in his life, Yeats was steeped deeply into the world of...
The Tower, written by W.B. Yeats in 1928, contains some of the poet’s best-known works, including “Leda and the Swan” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” The Tower was written during a pivotal time in Yeats’ artistic development. As a young writer, he had...
"A Prayer For My Daughter" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats. Written in 1919, just a few days after the birth of Yeats's daughter Anne, the poem consists of ten octets, or eight-line stanzas. Over the course of these ten stanzas, the...
Published in 1914 by Irish author William Butler Yeats, Responsibilities and Other Poems is a collection of poems about the responsibilities of life and how people must handle them. A play of a similar name and idea was published by Yeats' sister...
"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, written in 1919, several years after the end of World War I. It is named after the Christian "Second Coming," which is the Biblical prophecy that predicts Jesus's return to earth to reign...
"September 1913" is one of the best-known works by the twentieth-century Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It was written on the occasion of the 1913 Dublin lock-out dispute between Dublin's workers and the merchants and shopkeepers who made up the city's...
"The Song of Wandering Aengus" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, first published in 1897 before appearing in Yeats's 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds. The poem describes Aengus—an Irish god of youth, poetry, and love—entering the...
To a Shade is a 1916 poem first published in W.B. Yeats's collection Responsibilities and Other Poems. In this twenty-six-line work, Yeats voices anger and resentment towards Dublin's middle classes on behalf of two historical figures: the late...
In 1839, the first collection of poems by W. B. Yeats was published, taking its name from the last epic-style poem that Yeats ever wrote. The collection also included a number of poems that would be republished as one longer poem that Yeats...
"When You Are Old" is a poem by the Irish writer W.B. Yeats, originally published in the 1893 collection The Rose. The poem features a speaker who addresses an unnamed listener in the second person. This speaker imagines the listener's future, and...
"The Wild Swans at Coole" was written in 1916 when Yeats fifty-one. He was staying with his friend and patron Lady Gregory at her home near Coole Park, located in Galway, Ireland, a county located on Ireland's Atlantic coast. It was published in ...
