Category: Yeats, W. B.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) ranks among the foremost poets in the English language of the 20th century. An Irish literary giant, Yeats helped catalyze the Irish Literary Revival through his poetry and plays, which drew extensively from Irish folklore, landscape, and politics. He received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature for his career of “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”

 

Yeats was born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish family but spent much of his youth between County Sligo and London, environments which cultivated his interest in mysticism and Irish nationalism from an early age. After training to become a painter, Yeats turned seriously towards poetry in his twenties while engaged in an occult society in London. He self-published his first poems in the 1880s before earning wider acclaim with collections such as “The Wanderings of Oisin” inspired by Celtic myths.

 

Alongside Lady Gregory, Yeats was a leading figure of the Irish Literary Revival that sought to promote native Irish culture through art. As a playwright, Yeats co-founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin as a home for Irish drama productions, its name inspired by Yeats’ pub haunt the Abbey Tavern. Over a long career, Yeats cemented himself as Ireland’s most revered writer, renowned for welding personal heartache and unrequited love with Irish political angst and esoteric spirituality.

 

Yeats lived through immense political change in Ireland, from Charles Stuart Parnell’s home rule efforts to the Easter Rising of 1916 and ensuing Irish War of Independence. These events informed major poems like “Easter, 1916.” Generally skeptical of political dogma, Yeats nonetheless participated in Irish senators’ oath of allegiance in 1922 after independence. The same year, amidst the Irish Civil War, he published “The Tower” and some of his most renowned works including “Leda and the Swan” and “Sailing to Byzantium” – luminous, intricate poems enriched by occult and historical influences. Yeats continued writing until his death in 1939 in France, leaving an expansive poetic canon still widely influential in modern literature

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