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William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939) 
William Butler Yeats is considered by many critics to be the greatest poet writing in English in 
the XX century. He provides a bridge from the Victorian Age into the twentieth century. His early 
Romantic work, produced before the century turned, gradually became more realistic.
 
W. B. Yeats, an Irish poet and dramatist, was born in Sandymount, Ireland. His father was a 
painter. Yeats attended school in Dublin. Begin-ning as an art student, he soon gave up art for 

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literature. At twenty-one, he published his first work “Mosada”, a drama written in verse. During 
the 1890s and 1900s he published many volumes of poems, which were symbolic in manner, 
drawing his imagery from Irish myth and folklore. The most important collections of that period 
were: “The Wandering of Oisis” (1891), “The Wind Among the Reeds” (1899), “The Rose” (1903), 
“Green Helmet and Other Poems” (1912). 
For centuries Ireland had been an English colony, its economy exploited and its native 
culture suppressed. Yeats’s early poems and his book on Irish folk tales, “The Celtic Twilight” 
(1893), were in part political acts. 
W.B.Yeats contributed a great deal to the Irish national theatre. Writing for the stage 
impressed Yeats with the importance of precise, spare language. His best known plays are “The 
Countess Cathleen” (1892), “Deirdre” (1907). The latter derived from Celtic mythology.
During the 1920s Yeats became more prominent in both policy and literature. He became a 
senator in the Irish Free state in 1922 and in 1923 received the Noble Prize for Literature. In 1925 
Yeats published his major philosophical and historical prose work “A Vision”. 
While many poets produce their finest work during their early years, Yeats was one of those 
rare poets who created their greatest poems after the age of fifty. He began his poetic career as a 
Romantic and finished it as a poet of the modern world. His early work was strongly influenced by 
Blake and Shelley, by the French Symbolists, and Irish mythology. These early poems were often 
simple, romantic, musical, and dreamlike. In the middle of his career, his poetry became less 
dreamlike and more realistic. His tone became more conversational and his imagery more 
economical. In the last stages of his poetic career, his interest in historical cycles became dominant.
Thus, the evolution of Yeats’s art never ceased. The poems written when he was an old man (“The 
Tower”, 1928, “The Winding Stair”, 1920) are the most audacious.
Below, you will read one of William Butler Yeats’ poems. It is believed that Yeats wrote 
this poem for Major Robert Gregory, the son of his friend Lady Augusta Gregory. Major Gregory, 
an artist and aviator, was killed in action over Italy during World War I while flying for England’s 
Royal Flying Corps.