W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, near Dublin, in 1865, into a Protestant Anglo-Irish family. His father, John Butler Yeats, abandoned the law for portrait painting; his mother’s people, the Pollexfens, were merchants in Sligo, whose landscape became the poet’s lifelong country of the heart. He grew up between London and Dublin, studied at the Metropolitan School of Art, and was drawn early both to Irish legend and to the occult — Theosophy, séances, and in 1890 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

His first poems, steeped in Spenser, Shelley and the Pre-Raphaelites, turned increasingly to Irish myth, and The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) announced a new national poetry. In 1889 he met Maud Gonne, whose beauty and nationalist fervour haunted his verse for decades. With Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge he helped found the Abbey Theatre, opened in Dublin in 1904, and wrote for it plays such as Cathleen ni Houlihan. After 1900 his style hardened and grew more worldly; marriage in 1917 to Georgie Hyde-Lees, and their experiments in automatic writing, fed the private symbolic system that underlies much of his later work.

Yeats became a senator of the new Irish Free State in 1922 and received the Nobel Prize in 1923. Unusually, his greatest poetry followed the prize: The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair confront age, violence and the passing of an order with an austere music. He died in the south of France in January 1939; his remains were later brought home to Drumcliff in County Sligo.