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CAREER
William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin on the 13th of June 1865,
the son of John Butler Yeats, barrister turned portrait painter,
and Susan Pollexfen, daughter of a wealthy (mills and shipping)
Sligo family. Yeats's early years were spent between Dublin, London,
and Sligo, attending schools in London and Dublin before entering
the Metropolitan School of Art. However, he was increasingly drawn
to writing through his admiration for the works of Samuel Ferguson
and James Clarence Mangan.
Yeats's first volume of verse, Mosada,
A Dramatic Poem, came out in 1886 followed by The
Wanderings of Oisin (1889), the year that he met Maud Gonne,
who was to trouble his life and inspire his poetry for many years.
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"Mr. W. B. Yeats, presenting Mr. George Moore to the Queen
of the Fairies."
This cartoon by
Sir Max Beerbohm satirises Moore's initiation into the Irish
literary movement, with which he was to carry on a brief and
uneasy collaboration. |
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Yeats receiving his Honorary Degree
at Oxford. |
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Yeats published The Celtic Twilight
(1893), a volume that lent its name to a school of poetry noted
for its wavering rhythms and its evocation of melancholy, dream-like
states of feeling.
In 1894 Yeats found a patron in Lady Gregory of Coole Park, and
they cooperated in research into Irish folklore, and (with Edward
Martyn) in the Irish Literary Theatre.
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899),
contains the finest poetry of Yeats's early phase.
Yeats's volume, The Green Helmet
(1910), marks a departure from his earlier Celtic poetry, and it
was followed by Responsibilities
(1914), The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer
(1921), The Tower (1928), The
Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), A
Full Moon in March (1935), and Last
Poems (1939).
Yeats married George Hyde-Lees in 1917, and through her cooperation
as a medium he published A Vision
(1925). They had two children, Anne and Michael.
Yeats's international reputation as a poet was assured from the
1920s, and in 1923 he was awarded the Nobel prize. The Irish state
had already rewarded him with a seat in the Senate in 1922.
Yeats died on the 28th of January, 1939, in Roquebrune, France.
He was buried there and, in 1948, his remains were brought back
to Ireland to rest, as he had wished, "under
bare Ben Bulben's head in Drumcliff churchyard".
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