
Biography of William Butler Yeats
Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was 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 continue 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 Victorian 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 poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three.
Poems by William Butler Yeats
- A Coat
- A Dialogue of Self and Soul
- A Drinking Song
- A Meditation in Time of War
- A Needle's Eye
- A Prayer for My Daughter
- Adam's Curse
- Among School Children
- An Irish Airman foresees his Death
- Beggar to Beggar Cried
- Byzantium
- Conjunctions
- Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
- Down By the Salley Gardens
- Easter, 1916
- Ego Dominus Tuus
- Fallen Majesty
- From A Full Moon In March
- He and She
- He wishes his Beloved were Dead
- In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz
- Lapis Lazuli
- Love and the Bird
- Memory
- Meru
- Never give all the Heart
- No Second Troy
- On a Political Prisoner
- On being asked for a War Poem
- On Woman
- Paudeen
- Politics
- Reconciliation
- Running to Paradise
- Sailing to Byzantium
- September 1913
- Sixteen Dead Men
- The Cap and Bells
- The Circus Animals’ Desertion
- The Cold Heaven
- The Dawn
- The Everlasting Voices
- The Fascination of What’s Difficult
- The Fish
- The Fisherman
- The Four Ages of Man
- The Grey Rock
- The Hawk
- The Lake Isle of Innisfree
- The Magi
- The Mountain Tomb
- The Peacock
- The Phoenix
- The Player Queen
- The Realists
- The Rose Tree
- The Sad Shepherd
- The Scholars
- The Second Coming
- The Song of the Happy Shepherd
- The Song of Wandering Aengus
- The Sorrow of Love
- The Thorn Tree
- The Tower
- The Two Kings
- The Wild Swans at Coole
- The Witch
- There Is a Queen in China
- Three Songs to the Same Tune
- To a Child Dancing in the Wind
- To a Child Dancing upon the Shore
- To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing
- To a Shade
- To an Isle in the Water
- To Ireland in the Coming Times
- To the Rose upon the Rood of Time
- Under Ben Bulben
- When Helen Lived
- When You Are Old