William's own formal schooling began at the Godolphin Day School (nowadays Godolphin School).
Gallery of William Yeats
100 Thomas St, Usher's Quay, Dublin 8, D08 K521, Ireland
In the mid-1880s, Yeats pursued his own interest in art as a student at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin (nowadays National College of Art and Design).
Gallery of William Yeats
15 Ely Pl, Saint Peter's, Dublin, D02 A213, Ireland
Yeats attended the Royal Hibernian Academy School (now Royal Hibernian Academy), in Dublin.
College/University
Career
Gallery of William Yeats
1908
William Butler Yeats
Gallery of William Yeats
1915
William Butler Yeats
Gallery of William Yeats
1935
Poet Laureate John Masefield and William Butler Yeats attending a celebratory dinner in honor of the Yeats' 70th birthday, on the steps of the Hibernian Hotel, Dublin.
Gallery of William Yeats
1939
W.B. Yeats on his deathbed, by Georgie Hyde-Lees
Gallery of William Yeats
William Butler Yeats photographed in 1903 by Alice Boughton
Gallery of William Yeats
W.B. Yeats
Gallery of William Yeats
W.B. Yeats, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum
Gallery of William Yeats
William Butler Yeats
Achievements
Statue of W. B. Yeats in Sligo.
Membership
Awards
Nobel Prize
1968
The Nobel gold medal and a manuscript belonging to Irish playwright and poet William Butler Yeats.
William Butler Yeats leaves the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, after receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Oxford University. On the left is Frederick Homes Dudden, Vice Chancellor of Oxford University.
Poet Laureate John Masefield and William Butler Yeats attending a celebratory dinner in honor of the Yeats' 70th birthday, on the steps of the Hibernian Hotel, Dublin.
William Butler Yeats, Irish playwright and founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Photograph shows Yeats with his wife during visit to the U.S. in the late 1920s.
100 Thomas St, Usher's Quay, Dublin 8, D08 K521, Ireland
In the mid-1880s, Yeats pursued his own interest in art as a student at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin (nowadays National College of Art and Design).
(Yeats was fascinated by Irish myths and folklore, and joi...)
Yeats was fascinated by Irish myths and folklore, and joined forces with the writers of the Irish Literary Revival. He studied Irish folk tales and chose to reintroduce the glory and significance of Ireland's past through this unique literature.
(The Celtic Twilight ventures into the eerie and puckish w...)
The Celtic Twilight ventures into the eerie and puckish world of fairies, ghosts, and spirits. It first appeared in 1893, and its title refers to the pre-dawn hours, when the Druids performed their rituals. It consists of stories recounted to the poet by his friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. Yeats' faithful transcription of their narratives includes his own visionary experiences, appended to the storytellers' words as a form of commentary.
(Banshees and faeries, demons and curses, village ghosts a...)
Banshees and faeries, demons and curses, village ghosts and mystic poets work their Gaelic magic in this enthralling collection of supernatural tales from the pen of William Butler Yeats. Based on Irish country beliefs, traditions, and folk tales, the stories were first published at the height of Yeats' romantic period in three collections entitled The Celtic Twilight, The Secret Rose, and Stories of Red Hanrahan.
(The Wind Among the Reeds may be described as a collection...)
The Wind Among the Reeds may be described as a collection of love poems both intense and indirect. Now considered a watershed in Yeats's career, the book received mixed reviews when it was first published in April of 1899. The manuscripts collected here range from drafts on scraps of paper through heavily worked-over typescripts, to neatly copied texts from later years and proof sheets revised by hand.
(Cathleen Ni Houlihan appeared on the bill of plays produc...)
Cathleen Ni Houlihan appeared on the bill of plays produced in 1902 by the theatre, and although a short work, it was frequently revived until World War II. The story is based on the battle at Killala, one of many conflicts in Ireland's long fight for independence. Yeats depicts the love of family, poverty, anguish and hardship of the Irish peasantry through the symbolic portrayal of Ireland as a female spirit.
(This collection of Yeats essays includes the following ti...)
This collection of Yeats essays includes the following titles: What is Popular Poetry?, Speaking to the Psaltery, Magic, The Happiest of the Poets, The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry, At Stratford-On-Avon, William Blake and the Imagination, and many, many, more.
(Written in the musical speech of the poet's home region o...)
Written in the musical speech of the poet's home region of Kiltartan, County Galway, this collection of stories centers on country schoolmaster Red Hanrahan and his supernatural experiences. William Butler Yeats recounts "The Twisting of the Rope," "Red Hanrahan's Curse," "Hanrahan’s Vision," and other enchanting tales.
(This collection, published in 1919, reveals the poet’s ma...)
This collection, published in 1919, reveals the poet’s mastery of the mystical, the haunting, and the amusing. His lines are also intensely personal. Some you will want to read aloud. Others you will want to keep to yourself - almost as a secret between you and the poet.
(A Vision is a unique work of literary modernism, and reve...)
A Vision is a unique work of literary modernism, and revelatory guide to Yeats’s own poetry and thinking. Indispensable to an understanding of the poet’s late work, and entrancing on its own merit, the book presents the "system" of philosophy, psychology, history, and the life of the soul that Yeats and his wife, George, received and created by means of mediumistic experiments from 1917 through the early 1920s. Yeats obsessively revised the original book that he wrote in 1925, and the 1937 version is the definitive version of what Yeats wanted to say.
A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Love Poems of William Butler Yeats
(The forty-one poems collected in A Poet to his Beloved re...)
The forty-one poems collected in A Poet to his Beloved represent some of Yeats's most evocative and passionate early love poems. These verses are simple, lyrical, and often dreamy, and they speak knowingly of innocence and beauty, passion and desire, devotion and the fear of rejection.
The Yeats Reader: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose
(The Yeats Reader is the most comprehensive single volume ...)
The Yeats Reader is the most comprehensive single volume to display the full range of Yeats's talents. It presents more than one hundred and fifty of his best-known poems - more than any other compendium - plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from his published autobiographical and critical writings. In addition, an appendix offers six early texts of poems that Yeats later revised. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for a projected collection that never came to fruition. These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life.
The Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats was perhaps the greatest poet of the 20th century, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. The works of William Butler Yeats form a bridge between the romantic poetry of the nineteenth century and the hard clear language of modern poetry.
Background
William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865 in Sandymount, Ireland. His father, John Butler Yeats, a lawyer and a distinguished painter, was also a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy; his mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the eldest daughter of William Pollexfen, a merchant of the port town of Sligo in western Ireland. In 1867, when Yeats was only two, his family moved to London, but he spent much of his boyhood and school holidays in Sligo with his grandparents.
Education
William's own formal schooling began at the Godolphin Day School (nowadays Godolphin School). William's father added to his formal schooling with lessons at home that gave him an enduring taste for the classics. When the family returned from London back to Ireland in 1880, he attended Erasmus High School (nowadays Erasmus Smith High School). In the mid-1880s, Yeats pursued his own interest in art as a student at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin (nowadays National College of Art and Design), but soon left the school and attended the Royal Hibernian Academy School (now Royal Hibernian Academy), also in Dublin.
Yeats' first publication, two brief lyrics, appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885. Yeats took up the life of a professional writer in 1887. He joined the Theosophical Society, whose mysticism appealed to him because it was a form of imaginative life far removed from the workaday world. The age of science was repellent to Yeats; he was a visionary, and he insisted upon surrounding himself with poetic images. He began a study of the prophetic books of William Blake, and this enterprise brought him into contact with other visionary traditions, such as the Platonic, the Neoplatonic, the Swedenborgian, and the alchemical. His early poems, collected in The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems (1889), are the work of an aesthete, often beautiful but always rarefied, a soul’s cry for release from circumstance.
Yeats quickly became involved in the literary life of London. He became friends with William Morris and W.E. Henley, and he was a co-founder of the Rhymers’ Club, whose members included his friends Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons. In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne. In 1902 Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan was first performed in Dublin and Gonne played the title role. It was during this period that Yeats came under the influence of John O’Leary, a charismatic leader of the Fenians, a secret society of Irish nationalists.
In 1891, Yeats felt that Irish political life lost its significance. The vacuum left by politics might be filled, he felt, by literature, art, poetry, drama, and legend. The Celtic Twilight (1893), a volume of essays, was Yeats’s first effort toward this end, but progress was slow until 1898, when he met Augusta Lady Gregory, an aristocrat who was to become a playwright and his close friend. She was already collecting old stories, the lore of the west of Ireland. Yeats found that this lore chimed with his feeling for ancient ritual, for pagan beliefs never entirely destroyed by Christianity. He felt that if he could treat it in a strict and high style, he would create a genuine poetry while, in personal terms, moving toward his own identity. From 1898, Yeats spent his summers at Lady Gregory’s home, Coole Park, County Galway, and he eventually purchased a ruined Norman castle called Thoor Ballylee in the neighbourhood. Under the name of the Tower, this structure would become a dominant symbol in many of his latest and best poems.
After Maud Gonne declined his proposal, Yeats devoted himself to literature and drama, believing that poems and plays would engender a national unity capable of transfiguring the Irish nation. He (along with Lady Gregory and others) was one of the originators of the Irish Literary Theatre, which gave its first performance in Dublin in 1899 with Yeats’s play The Countess Cathleen. To the end of his life Yeats remained a director of this theatre, which became the Abbey Theatre in 1904. In the crucial period from 1899 to 1907, he managed the theatre’s affairs, encouraged its playwrights (notably John Millington Synge), and contributed many of his own plays. Among the latter that became part of the Abbey Theatre’s repertoire are 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 (1907).
Yeats published several volumes of poetry during this period, notably Poems (1895) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which are typical of his early verse in their dreamlike atmosphere and their use of Irish folklore and legend. But in the collections In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet (1910), Yeats slowly discarded the Pre-Raphaelite colours and rhythms of his early verse and purged it of certain Celtic and esoteric influences. The years from 1909 to 1914 mark a decisive change in his poetry. The otherworldly, ecstatic atmosphere of the early lyrics has cleared, and the poems in Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) show a tightening and hardening of his verse line, a more sparse and resonant imagery, and a new directness with which Yeats confronts reality and its imperfections.
In 1917 Yeats published The Wild Swans at Coole. From then onward he reached and maintained the height of his achievement - a renewal of inspiration and a perfecting of technique that are almost without parallel in the history of English poetry. The Tower (1928), named after the castle he owned and had restored, is the work of a fully accomplished artist; in it, the experience of a lifetime is brought to perfection of form. Still, some of Yeats’s greatest verse was written subsequently, appearing in The Winding Stair (1929). The poems in both of these works use, as their dominant subjects and symbols, the Easter Rising and the Irish civil war; Yeats’s own tower; the Byzantine Empire and its mosaics; Plato, Plotinus, and Porphyry; and the author’s interest in contemporary psychical research. Yeats explained his own philosophy in the prose work A Vision (1925, revised version 1937).
In 1913 Yeats spent some months at Stone Cottage, Sussex, with the American poet Ezra Pound acting as his secretary. Pound was then editing translations of the nō plays of Japan, and Yeats was greatly excited by them. The nō drama provided a framework of drama designed for a small audience of initiates, a stylized, intimate drama capable of fully using the resources offered by masks, mime, dance, and song and conveying - in contrast to the public theatre - Yeats’s own recondite symbolism. Yeats devised what he considered an equivalent of the nō drama in such plays as Four Plays for Dancers (1921), At the Hawk’s Well (first performed 1916), and several others.
In 1922, on the foundation of the Irish Free State, Yeats accepted an invitation to become a member of the new Irish Senate: he served for six years. In 1936 his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935, a gathering of the poems he loved, was published. Still working on his last plays, he completed The Herne’s Egg, his most raucous work, in 1938. Yeats’s last two verse collections, New Poems and Last Poems and Two Plays, appeared in 1938 and 1939 respectively. In these books many of his previous themes are gathered up and rehandled, with an immense technical range; the aged poet was using ballad rhythms and dialogue structure with undiminished energy as he approached his 75th year. Yeats died in January 1939 while abroad.
Separated by his background from the Roman Catholic majority and rejecting the materialist values of the dominant Protestant minority, Yeats turned from the beginning to pagan Ireland for his inspiration. He was also interested in esoteric mysticism, founding a society in Dublin to study Hinduism and Asian religions.
Politics
W. B. Yeats worked hard as a propagandist for the nationalists, ultimately joining a revolutionary group, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, in 1896. Later in life the celebrated writer became a political figure in the new Irish Free State, serving as a senator for six years beginning in 1922.
Views
Yeats is generally considered one of the twentieth century key English language poets. He was a Symbolist poet, using allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career.
Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland’s native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.
Yeats devised his doctrine of the mask as a means of presenting very personal thoughts and experiences to the world without danger of sentimentality or that kind of "confessional poetry" that is often a subtle form of self-pity. By discovering the kind of man who would be his exact opposite, Yeats believed he could then put on the mask of this ideal "anti-self" and thus produce art from the synthesis of opposing natures. For this reason his poetry is often structured on paired opposites, as in "Sailing to Byzantium," in which oppositions work against each other creatively to form a single unity, the poem itself.
Yeats turned to magic for the nonlogical system that would oppose and complete his art. He drew upon theosophy, Hermetic writings, and Buddhism, as well as upon Jewish and Christian apocryphal books (for example, the Cabala). To explain his theories he invented "a lunar parable": the sun and moon, day and night, and seasonal cycles became for him symbols of the harmonious synthesis of opposites, a means of capturing "in a single thought reality and justice." He illustrated his theory with cubist drawings of the gyres (interpenetrating cones) to show how antithetical elements in life (solarlunar, moral-esthetic, objective-subjective) interact. By assigning a different type of personality to each of the 28 phases of the moon (arranged like spokes on a "Great Wheel"), he attempted to show how one could find his exact opposite and at the same time discover his place in the scheme of universal order. Yeats believed that history was cyclic and that every 2,000 years a new cycle begins, which is the opposite of the cycle that has preceded it. In his poem "The Second Coming," the birth of Christ begins one cycle, which ends, as the poem ends, with a "rough beast," mysterious and menacing, who "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born."
Quotations:
"If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."
"I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe's welcome to the Free State." (His reply to many of the letters of congratulations sent to him for winning a Noble prize)
"If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North ... You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation."
Membership
Always an organizer of artists and a joiner of groups, Yeats became a founding member of the Rhymers' Club in London in 1891 and of the Irish Literary Society of Dublin in 1892.
Theosophical Society of London
,
United Kingdom
1887
Order of the Golden Dawn
,
United Kingdom
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Seamus Heaney: "He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age."
Interests
occult sciences
Connections
In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne, an Irish beauty, ardent and brilliant. He fell in love with her, but his love was hopeless. Maud Gonne liked and admired him, but she was not in love with him. In 1899 Yeats asked Maud Gonne to marry him, but she declined. Four years later she married Major John MacBride, an Irish soldier who shared her feeling for Ireland and her hatred of English oppression: he was one of the rebels later executed by the British government for their part in the Easter Rising of 1916.
In 1917 Yeats asked Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne’s daughter, to marry him. She refused. Some weeks later he proposed to Miss George Hyde-Lees and was accepted; they were married in 1917. A daughter, Anne Butler Yeats, was born in 1919, and a son, William Michael Yeats, in 1921.
The Poetry of William Butler Yeats
One of the greatest poets of the century, the Noble Laureate William Butler Yeats drew upon Irish folklore and myth as inspiration for much of his early poetry. Mythic themes as well as many other topics are masterfully explored in this rich selection of lyrics.
1996
Poetry for Young People: William Butler Yeats
Matching the beauty of Yeats' written images are a series of exquisite and evocative paintings, which range from panoramic natural landscapes to compelling portraits of characters both human and fantastic. And, as always, this acclaimed series features fascinating biographical information, introductions to each verse, and full annotations that define difficult unfamiliar vocabulary.
Yeats, The Man And The Masks
The most influential poet of his age, Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner.