Content. Introduction. Chapter. I. Famous Irish Poet

1.2 William Butler Yeat’s biography.
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer who was one of the finest English-language poets of the 20th century. He was born in Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, and died in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, on January 28, 1939. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. John Butler Yeats, Yeats' father, was a lawyer who later turned to portrait painting. His mother, Susan Pollexfen, was a wealthy merchant's daughter from Sligo in western Ireland. Yeats (pronounce "Yates") claimed kinship with a number of Anglo-Irish Protestant families that are referenced in his work through both parents. In a country where the majority of the population was Roman Catholic, Yeats would typically have been expected to identify with his Protestant tradition. However, he did not. He was actually cut off from both of the historical traditions that were available to him in Ireland—from the Protestants because he was repulsed by their emphasis on monetary success and from the Roman Catholics because he did not share their religious beliefs. The tradition of a hidden Ireland that existed primarily in the anthropological evidence of its surviving customs, beliefs, and holy places—more pagan than Christian—seemed to be Yeats's best chance, in his opinion. This tradition was more profound than either the Catholic or the Protestant traditions. Yeats' family went to London in 1867 when he was just two years old, but he spent much of his childhood and school breaks in Sligo with his grandparents. This nation would influence Yeats's writing and serve as the backdrop for many of his poems thanks to its natural beauty, folklore, and paranormal tale. His family returned to Dublin in 1880, where he attended high school. The most significant aspect of his study at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where he studied in 1883, was getting to know other poets and artists. Yeats was starting to compose in the meantime; his first work, two quick lyrics, appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885.⁴ Yeats began living the life of a professional writer when his family returned to London in 1887. He joined the Theosophical Society because its mysticism appealed to him as a way of living that was separate from the everyday world. Yeats, a dreamer who insisted on surrounding himself with lyrical images, found the age of science repugnant. He started reading William Blake's prophetic works, and this activity introduced him to other visionary traditions like the Platonic, Neoplatonic, Swedenborgian, and alchemical. Yeats was already a self-confident young man, and his pride compelled him to rely on his own aesthetic preferences and sense of design. Although he was not conceited, he had no trouble with spiritual haughtiness. His early poems are the work of an aesthete, frequently beautiful but always rarefied, a soul's scream for freedom from circumstance. They are gathered in The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems (1889). Yeats rapidly got immersed in London's literary scene. He made acquaintances with W.E. Henley and William Morris, and he co-founded the Rhymers' Club with his companions Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons. Yeats met Maud Gonne, an intelligent and passionate Irish beauty, in 1889. According to what he wrote, "the difficulty of my life began" at that point. Although he loved her, his relationship with her was doomed. Despite not being in love with him, Maud Gonne thought highly of him. She was an Irish rebel, patriot, and rhetorician with a powerful voice and appearance who was passionate about Ireland. Yeats joined the Irish nationalist fight out of love for Maud and partially out of conviction. She played the lead part in the Dublin premiere of Yeats' play Cathleen ni Houlihan in 1902. During this time, John O'Leary, a dynamic leader of the Fenians, a covert organization of Irish nationalists, had an impact on Yeats. Yeats believed that Irish political life lost its relevance with the controversial Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell's quick deterioration and passing in 1891. He believed that literature, art, poetry, theatre, and folklore could fill the void left by politics. Yeats made his first attempt at achieving this goal with The Celtic Twilight (1893), a collection of essays, but it took him until 1898 to meet Augusta Lady Gregory, an aristocrat who would go on to become a dramatist and become close to him. She had already started compiling ancient tales and western Ireland's folklore. Yeats discovered that this folklore matched his affinity for ancient ritual and paganism, which was never completely eradicated by Christianity. He believed that if he could approach it in a precise and refined manner, he would produce true poetry and, more importantly, advance personally. Yeats began spending his summers at Lady Gregory's estate in Coole Park, County Galway, in 1898. Eventually, he bought a disused Norman castle there named Thoor Ballylee. This building would take on the name of the Tower and turn into a recurrent motif in many of his most recent and accomplished writings. Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne in 1899, but she turned him down. Major John MacBride, an Irish soldier who had participated in the 1916 Easter Rising, was one of the rebels later put to death by the British government for his role in the uprising. They wed four years later. Yeats, meantime, committed himself to literature and drama because he thought that plays and poems could help the Irish people come together in a way that would transform the country. He helped found the Irish Literary Theatre, which debuted in Dublin in 1899 with Yeats' play The Countess Cathleen. Other founders included Lady Gregory. Yeats stayed in charge of this theater, which changed its name to the Abbey Theatre in 1904, until the end of his life. He oversaw the theater's operations during the vital years between 1899 and 1907, supported its playwrights, particularly John Millington Synge, and contributed a number of his own plays. The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The Hour Glass (1903), The King's Threshold (1904), On Baile's Strand (1905), and Deirdre are a few of the latter that were added to the Abbey Theatre's repertoire (1907). During this time, Yeats wrote a number of collections of poetry, including Poems (1895) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which are representative of his early poems in terms of their dreamy ambiance and use of Irish mythology and legend.⁵ However, Yeats gradually abandoned the Pre-Raphaelite hues and rhythms of his early work in the collections In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet (1910) and stripped it of some Celtic and occult inspirations. His poetry underwent a significant transformation between 1909 and 1914. The ecstatic, otherworldly atmosphere of the earlier songs has subsided, and the poems in Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) demonstrate a tightening and hardness of his verse line, more austere and resonant imagery, and a fresh directness with which Yeats confronts reality and its flaws. Yeats released The Wild Swans at Coole in 1917. From that point on, he attained and sustained the pinnacle of his success, experiencing a fresh infusion of creativity and honing of style that are essentially unmatched in the annals of English poetry. The Tower (1928), which bears the name of the castle he owned and had repaired, is the creation of a highly accomplished artist; it perfectly captures a lifetime's worth of experience. However, some of Yeats's best verse was later written and can be found in The Winding Stair (1929). The poems in these two collections use the Easter Rising and the Irish Civil War as their primary subjects and symbols, as well as Yeats' own tower, the Byzantine Empire and its mosaics, Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry, as well as the author's interest in modern psychical research. In the prose piece A Vision (1925; updated edition 1937), Yeats outlined his personal philosophy. Despite its obscurities, this study on the connection between imagination, history, and the occult is still essential reading for serious Yeats scholars. Yeats spent a few months in 1913 at Stone Cottage, Sussex, where Ezra Pound, an American poet, served as his secretary. Yeats was quite interested in the Japanese n dramas that Pound was editing at the time. The n' drama presented a structure for drama made for a small group of initiates; it was a stylized, intimate drama capable of making full use of the resources supplied by masks, mime, dance, and song and conveying—in contrast to the public theatre—Yeats' own recondite symbolism. In plays like At the Hawk's Well (1916), Four Plays for Dancers (1921), and many others, Yeats created what he thought of as an approximation of the n-drama.⁶ Yeats proposed to Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne's daughter, in 1917. She declined. A few weeks later, he made a marriage proposal to Miss George Hyde-Lees, which she accepted. They wed in 1917. In 1919, Anne Butler Yeats, a daughter, and William Michael Yeats, a son, were both born. Yeats accepted an invitation to join the new Irish Senate in 1922, following the establishment of the Irish Free State, and he did so for six years. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. He was without a doubt one of the most influential poets of the modern era and is now a well-known personality. His collection of his favorite poems, Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935, was released in 1936. His most boisterous drama, The Herne's Egg, which he finished in 1938 while still working on his final pieces. Yeats published his final two books of verse in 1938 and 1939, titled New Poems and Last Poems and Two Plays. The aged poet was still using ballad rhythms and dialogue structure with undiminished enthusiasm as he entered his 75th year. In these books, many of his former themes are collected together and rehandled, with an amazing technical range. Yeats passed away while traveling in 1939. Inability to finalize plans prevented his burial in Ireland, thus he was interred in Roquebrune, France. The start of World War II in the autumn of 1939 prevented plans to have his body interred in Sligo. As he requested in "Under Ben Bulben," one of his Last Poems, his body was finally returned to Sligo in 1948, where it was interred in a little Protestant churchyard at Drumcliffe with his own epitaph: "Cast a chilly eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!" Yeats would likely be regarded today as a minor poet working in the dying Pre-Raphaelite tradition, which for a brief period drew new beauty and poignancy from the Celtic renaissance, had he stopped writing when he was 40. A poet's best work never has been produced between the ages of 50 and 75 before in literary history. The power of Yeats's writing during this time comes from his extensive and committed training in poetry, his experiments with a variety of poetic, dramatic, and prose forms, as well as his personal evolution, which he wove into the framework of his own mythology.