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Introduction About The Poet

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He was born in Dublin in 1865 to an Irish painter and spent much of his childhood in County Sligo. Yeats helped found the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and wrote plays inspired by Irish legends as well as poetry influenced by Irish mythology and his love Maud Gonne. Throughout his life, Yeats was deeply interested in mysticism and the occult. He served as a senator in the Irish Free State and is remembered as an important cultural leader and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

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861 views

Introduction About The Poet

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He was born in Dublin in 1865 to an Irish painter and spent much of his childhood in County Sligo. Yeats helped found the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and wrote plays inspired by Irish legends as well as poetry influenced by Irish mythology and his love Maud Gonne. Throughout his life, Yeats was deeply interested in mysticism and the occult. He served as a senator in the Irish Free State and is remembered as an important cultural leader and one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

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Sr Chandrodaya J
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William Butler Yeats Biography

Playwright, Poet (1865–1939)

William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century and received the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
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
(restoration), a movement against the cultural (civilizing/educational) influences of English rule in Ireland
during the Victorian period, which sought to promote (uphold) the spirit of Ireland's native heritage(national
legacy or tradition). Though Yeats never learned Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew
extensively (widely) from sources in Irish mythology (legends/tradition). Also a potent (strong) influence on
his poetry was the Irish revolutionary (radical activist) Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally
famous for her passionate (ardent, zealous) nationalist (supporter of Independnce) 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, Greorgie 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 pessimism (negativity) 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
(shortness) and imagery (metaphors), but Yeats never abandoned (neglected) his strict adherence (loyalty) to
traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism (religion/spirituality) and the occult (the
hidden and the difficult to see), which was off-putting (distasteful) to some readers, but he remained
uninhibited (open) in advancing (progressing) his idiosyncratic (peculiar) philosophy, and his poetry
continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator (member of Assembly) 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.

His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination (intrest) with mysticism (theology) and
spiritualism.
His Great Works are: Short Stories

Fiction • The Land Of Heart's Desire

• The Celtic Twilight • Rosa Alchemica


• Stories of Red Hanrahan
Non-Fiction
• Synge And The Ireland Of His Time
• Out of the Rose
• Four Years
• The Heart of the Spring
Plays • The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows
• The Old Men of the Twilight
• The Countess Cathleen
• Where There is Nothing, There is God
• The Hour Glass
• Of Costello the Proud
Poetry • The Dolls
• The Everlasting Voices
• A Prayer For My Daughter
• The Fish
• Aedh Wishes For The Clothes Of Heaven
• The Harp of Aengus
• Against Unworthy Praise
• The Host Of The Air
• Baile And Aillinn
• The Hosting Of The Sidhe
• Broken Dreams
• The Lake Isle Of Innisfree
• Easter, 1916
• The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart
• He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven
• The Mask
• Her Praise
• The Moods
• In the Seven Woods
• The Old Age Of Queen Maeve
• King And No King
• The Rose Tree
• Lapis Lazuli
• The Second Coming
• Leda And The Swan
• The Secret Rose
• No Second Troy
• The Seven Sages
• O Do Not Love Too Long
• The Shadowy Waters
• Politics
• The Song of the Happy Shepherd
• Sailing to Byzantium
• The Stolen Child
• Swift's Epitaph
• The Three Beggars
• The Arrow
• The Tower
• The Black Tower
• The Two Trees
• The Crucifixion Of The Outcast
• The Wheel
• The Wild Swans At Coole
• The Wisdom Of The King
• To A Young Beauty
• To A Young Girl
• To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time
• Towards Break Of Day
• What Was Lost
• When You Are Old

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