Yeats, W(illiam) B(utler) (1865–1939)

Irish poet and dramatist W B Yeats, shown here with US-born poet T S Eliot on the right, was in 1898 one of the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre, which later became the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. A dedicated nationalist, Yeats drew on Irish legends in much of his work.

Irish poet, dramatist, and scholar. He was a leader of the Irish literary revival and a founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His early work was romantic and lyrical, as in the poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and the plays The Countess Cathleen (1892) and The Land of Heart's Desire (1894). His later poetry, which includes The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) and The Winding Stair (1929), was much influenced by European and Eastern thought. Throughout his career Yeats's poetic style underwent an extraordinary process of reinvention and modernization, and shaped itself around an array of personal, mythological, and political concerns. His deep influence on both Irish literature and on poetry in English in general, and his stature as an imaginative artist, can hardly be exaggerated. He was a senator of the Irish Free State 1922–28, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Yeats was born into a Protestant family in Dublin and was educated in both London and Dublin. He spent much time in England, and died in the south of France, but his most productive years were spent living in County Sligo, Ireland. Following his artist father's footsteps, he first studied painting but soon turned to writing. In his early verse and poetic plays, such as The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), and Deirdre (1907), he drew heavily on Irish legend to create allusive, sensuous imagery. Later, his work adopted a more robust, astringent style and a tighter structure, and displayed a preoccupation with public affairs, all evident in the collection Responsibilities (1914).

Yeats was committed to the cause of Irish nationalism, but not as a political activist; rather, he saw nationalist aspirations as part of a wider spiritual revival, and felt that by finding a ‘unity of being’ in himself, he might help create a kind of cultural and intellectual unity among his compatriots. In this, he was greatly influenced by the renowned beauty and ardent nationalist Maude Gonne, whom he met in 1889, and to whom many of his poems were addressed. However, she refused to marry him, and in 1917 he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, whose work as a spiritual medium reinforced his leanings towards mystic symbolism, as in the prose work A Vision (1925). Among his later volumes of verse are The Tower (1928) and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939). His other prose works include Autobiographies (1926) and Dramatis Personae (1936). After his death, his body was brought back from France and buried in Drumcliffe churchyard, County Sligo.