W.B. Yeats Biography W. B. Yeats Books . . William Butler Yeats was a Nobel Prize winning Irish dramatist, author and poet who was best known for writing “The Celtic Twilight”. Yeats’ works focus heavily on Irish mythology and history. He never was able to fully embrace his Protestant past nor did he join the majority of Ireland’s Roman Catholics. He also devoted much of his life to study in a myriad of other subjects including theosophy, mysticism, spiritualism, and the Kabbalah. William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865 in the seaside village of Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen was the daughter of a wealthy family from County Sligo. William’s father John Butler Yeats was studying to become a lawyer at the time of his marriage but soon gave that up to follow his dreams of becoming an artist, of which he became a well known portrait painter. At a young age William was already reading Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Donne and the works of William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

These books were recommended by his father and inspiration for his own creativity, but fellow Irish poets Standish James O’Grady and Sir William Ferguson were perhaps the most influential. Yeats became a devoted patriot and found his voice to speak out against the harsh Nationalist policies of the time. His early dramatic works convey his deep respect for the Irish legend and fascination with the occult, while his later works take on a more poetical and experimental aspect. Yeats spent most of his life between Sligo, Dublin, and London, but his profound influence to future poets and playwrights and theatre, music and film can be seen the world over. Yeat’s mother Susan was the first to introduce him and his two sisters Susan Mary and Elizabeth Corbet to the Irish folktales he would grow to love so much. His younger brother Jack Butler Yeats would follow in his father’s footsteps and also become an accomplished artist. When William was just two years old his father decided to move the family to London, England to study art. There William attended the Godolphin School in Hammersmith to begin his education before the family moved back to Dublin. Once back in Dublin William attended Erasmus Smith High School and spent much of his time at his father’s nearby art studio.

Pursuing his own interests in the arts, in 1884 he decided to enroll in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin for two years, during which some of his first poems were printed in the Dublin University Review. The Yeats were now living in London in Bedford Park and their home was the lively gathering place for their many writer and artist friends to discuss politics, religion, literature, and art. It was at this time that he also met many of the other up-and-coming authors and poets of his generation. In 1903, as a successful poet and playwright now, Yeats went on his first lecture tour of the United States, and would repeat the tour again in 1914, 1920, and 1932. Yeats and his sisters joined forces and started the Cuala Press in 1904, which would print continuously until it closed in 1946. In 1911 at the age of forty-six, Yeats met Georgie Hyde Lees and they married on October 20, 1917.

They had two children; Anne, born in 1919 and for whom he wrote the well known poem “A Prayer for My Daughter” and a son Michael was born on August 22, 1921, for whom Yeats wrote “A Prayer for My Son”. William Butler Yeats died, on January 28, 1939, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France he was seventy-three years old. . He was first buried there then as were his wishes, in then 1948 re-interred in Drumcliff churchyard, County Sligo, Ireland. William Butler Yeats - inspirational Irish poet | Ireland.com A journey through Ireland with W.B. Yeats Follow Yeats’ footsteps across the country and see where one of Ireland’s greatest poets found inspiration. Yeats 2015 Watch international stars of stage, screen and song celebrate the birth of one of Ireland’s greatest literary figures, through music and verse. William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the most significant figures of 20th Century literature. A poet and playwright, his work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland.

William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939 Yeats was born on June 13th 1865 and in 1923 he was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. So if you’d like to learn more about literary Ireland, tour the island from Sligo to Dublin and discover the places that inspired Yeats. Who knows, maybe you’ll be moved to pen your own poem along the way? Welcome to Yeats Country Explore Sligo, the spiritual home of the poet and see the landscape through artistic eyes. Although Yeats was born in Dublin it wasn’t long before his family relocated to Sligo. Yeats came to regard Sligo as his childhood home and penned a number of poems from inspiration he gathered from his surroundings. It was the mountains, lakes and lore of the place that moved him to write perhaps his most famous verse, The Lake Isle of Innisfree. The Isle of Innisfree, Sligo I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree. W.B.

Yeats Yeats called Sligo “The Land of Heart’s Desire” and it’s the beauty of the county that filled his early poetry. Ben Bulben is a brooding bump on Sligo’s coast and Yeats felt its presence so deeply that he wrote the poem Under Ben Bulben. Yeats’ relationship with the mountain continues to this day as he is buried in its shadow in Drumcliff cemetery. Must-see sights in Sligo W B Yeats Biography - Facts, Childhood, Family Life & Achievements Of The Irish Poet Writers W B Yeats Biography William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright. Check out this biography to know about his childhood, family life and other facts related to his life. Quick Facts Georgie Hyde-Lees (m. 1917â1939) education National College of Art and Design (1884 â 1886) awards: Nobel Prize in Literature (1923) William Butler Yeats was a famous Irish poet, dramatist and one of the pioneers of the literary world in the 20th century. The author was also a member of the Irish Senate and served it for two terms.

He made significant contributions to both English and Irish literature, and is particularly remembered for his role in reviving the latter. The son of a prominent portrait painter, he became interested in literature and poetry at a young age. During his growing years he witnessed the rise of the Home rule movement and the nationalist revival which greatly impacted his young mind. He began writing when he was still in his teens and soon blossomed into a promising writer cum poet. Along with writing he was also interested in other forms of art and was deeply inclined towards politics. Along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, Yeats founded the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief during its early years. Taking forward his love for politics, he served as an Irish Senator for two terms during his later years. In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature making him the first Irishman to be honored with the award. Childhood & Early Life William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 in County Dublin, Ireland to John Butler Yeats, a lawyer turned portrait painter and Susan Mary Pollexfen, daughter of a wealthy family from county Sligo.

He had a brother named Jack and two sisters, namely, Elizabeth and Susan Mary. His father was a supporter of nationalism and the nationalist movement in the country. He received his early education at home from his parents and entered the Godolphin school in 1877. He was an average student though he developed a deep interest in literature and poetry. After spending a few years in England, the family moved to Dublin where he resumed his education at Dublin's Erasmus Smith High School in 1881. It was during this time that he began writing seriously. From 1884 to 1886, William attended the Metropolitan School of Artânow the National College of Art and Design. Career William Butler Yeatsâ initial works were heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Edmund Spenser, and eventually he turned to Irish mythology and folklore and the writings of William Blake. He returned to London in the late 1880s and became acquainted with writers Oscar Wilde, Lionel Johnson and George Bernard Shaw. During this time he also met Maud Gonne, an ardent nationalist and supporter of Irish independence. She became his muse and greatly inspired his works.

In 1890, Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The same year also saw the founding of the Rhymersâ Club in which Yeats was a co-founder. The club consisted of a group of London-based poets who met regularly in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their verse. Yeats then proceeded to publish two anthologies of the Rhymers' work, the first one in 1892 and the second one in 1894. Along with literature, he also loved the theater and wrote several plays. He collaborated with the likes of Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore to establish the Irish Literary Theatre for the purpose of performing Irish and Celtic plays. As a dramatist, his successful works included âThe Countess Cathleenâ (1892), âThe Land of Heartâs Desireâ (1894) and âThe Kingâs Thresholdâ (1904). He also had a major role to play in the founding of the Abbey Theatre, also known as the National Theatre of Ireland, which first opened in 1904.

The theatre was closely associated with the Irish Literary Revival--also called the Irish Literary Renaissance-- a revival of interest in Ireland's Gaelic heritage and the growth of Irish nationalism from the middle of the 19th century. The new theatre was a great success in its initial years. Its popularity was primarily due to the association of well-known playwrights like Yeats and John Millington Synge; John Millington Synge was considered one of the foremost English-language dramatists of his era. Due to its association with many writers, Abbey gained its reputation as a writers' theatre. Yeats has a deep interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology as well. In 1911, he became a member of the paranormal research organization "The Ghost Club" and remained interested in the subjects throughout life. In 1913, Yeats wrote the preface for the English translation of Rabindranath Tagore's âGitanjaliâ (Song Offering), the seminal work which earned Tagore the Nobel Prize in literature that year. Even though an Irish nationalist at heart, Yeats played down his revolutionary spirit and distanced himself from the intense political landscape for several years.

Finally in 1922, he was appointed Senator for the Irish Free State, a position he held for six years. He continued to write until his death. He was noted for both his lyrical and dramatic works, the best of which are considered to be âThe Wild Swans at Cooleâ (1919), âMichael Robartes and the Dancerâ (1921), âThe Towerâ (1928), âThe Winding Stair and Other Poemsâ (1933), and âLast Poems and Playsâ (1940). Major Works His book of poems, âMichael Robartes and the Dancerâ is one of his best known poetry collections; the book includes poems like âSolomon And The Witchâ, âAn Image From A Past Lifeâ, âThe Rose-Treeâ, âOn A Political Prisonerâ and âThe Leaders Of The Crowd.â Another poignant poem in the book is âA Prayer For My Daughterâ addressed to his daughter, Ann.

His short play âThe Resurrectionâ depicts a discussion among three men ("The Greek" or "The Egyptian," "The Hebrew," and "The Syrian") who are among the first to meet the resurrected Christ. His book length study, âA Visionâ is among his most celebrated works. He covered various philosophical, historical, astrological, and poetic topics in the work which is counted amongst the most remarkable channeled documents of the 20th century. The book has been compared to âEureka: A Prose Poemâ, the final major work of Edgar Allan Poe. Another one of his popular poetry collections is âThe Winding Stairâ where the title refers to the staircase in the Thoor Ballylee castle which Yeats had purchased and lived in with his family for some time. It included poems such as âSpilt Milkâ, âThe Nineteenth Century and Afterâ, âStatisticsâ, âThree Movementsâ, and âThe Seven Sages.â Awards & Achievements W. B.

Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation". Ireland had newly become independent at that time and he was the first Irish man to be honored with the coveted prize. Personal Life & Legacy In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, an ardent Irish nationalist. He was smitten by her from the very beginning and she soon became his muse. He was deeply in love with her and proposed marriage to her several times, only to be turned down. Maud later went on to marry another man. He became acquainted with Olivia Shakespear, a British novelist and playwright, in 1894. The two began an affair even though Olivia was married at that time. The affair came to an end in 1897. Maud Gonneâs marriage broke down and eventually her former husband died. This gave rise to hope in Yeatsâ mind that she might now marry him. Even though she agreed to have a physical relationship with him, she once again refused his marriage proposal.

Middle-aged by now, Yeats proposed to 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees, and the young lady agreed to marry him despite the fact that Yeats was now 51. Against all odds, the marriage proved to be a happy one and produced two children. The successful marriage, however, did not prevent the writer from having romantic liaisons with other women. W.B. Yeats died on January 28, 1939, at the age of 73, at the HÃ´tel IdÃ©al SÃ©jour, in Menton, France. Translate this page to Spanish, French, Hindi, Portuguese People Also Viewed William Butler Yeats | Irish author and poet | Britannica.com Irish author and poet Samuel Beckett William Butler Yeats, (born June 13, 1865, Sandymount, Dublin , Ireland—died January 28, 1939, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France), Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. William Butler Yeats, c.

1915. The Granger Collection, New York Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats , was a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo , in western Ireland. Through both parents Yeats (pronounced “Yates”) claimed kinship with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families who are mentioned in his work. Normally, Yeats would have been expected to identify with his Protestant tradition—which represented a powerful minority among Ireland’s predominantly Roman Catholic population—but he did not. Indeed, he was separated from both historical traditions available to him in Ireland—from the Roman Catholics, because he could not share their faith, and from the Protestants, because he felt repelled by their concern for material success. Yeats’s best hope, he felt, was to cultivate a tradition more profound than either the Catholic or the Protestant—the tradition of a hidden Ireland that existed largely in the anthropological evidence of its surviving customs, beliefs, and holy places, more pagan than Christian.

Irish literature: Yeats 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. This country—its scenery, folklore, and supernatural legend—would colour Yeats’s work and form the setting of many of his poems. In 1880 his family moved back to Dublin , where he attended the high school. In 1883 he attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where the most important part of his education was in meeting other poets and artists. Meanwhile, Yeats was beginning to write: his first publication, two brief lyrics , appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885. When the family moved back to London in 1887, Yeats took up the life of a professional writer. 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. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent Yeats was already a proud young man, and his pride required him to rely on his own taste and his sense of artistic style. He was not boastful, but spiritual arrogance came easily to him. 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 cofounder of the Rhymers’ Club, whose members included his friends Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons . In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne , an Irish beauty, ardent and brilliant. From that moment, as he wrote, “the troubling of my life began.” 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. Her passion was lavished upon Ireland; she was an Irish patriot, a rebel, and a rhetorician, commanding in voice and in person. When Yeats joined in the Irish nationalist cause, he did so partly from conviction , but mostly for love of Maud. When Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan was first performed in Dublin in 1902, she 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. British Culture and Politics After the rapid decline and death of the controversial Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell 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. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies 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.

Meanwhile, 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. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest 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); this meditation upon the relation between imagination, history, and the occult remains indispensable to serious students of Yeats despite its obscurities. 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. Trending Topics William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats 1865 - 1939 The Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats was perhaps the greatest poet of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and was the leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance. The work of William Butler Yeats forms a bridge between the romantic and often decadent poetry of the fin de siï¿½cle and the hard clear language of modern poetry. Under his leadership the Abbey Theatre Company of Dublin contributed several major dramatists to the modern theatre. Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Dublin.

He was the oldest of four children of John Butler Yeats, a noted portrait artist of the Pre-Raphaelite school, who supplemented William's formal schooling at the Godolphin School in Hammersmith, England, with lessons at home that gave him an enduring taste for the classics. The effect of John Yeats's forceful personality and his personal philosophy - a blend of estheticism and atheism - upon William were felt much later, in the mature poet's abiding interest in magic and the occult sciences and in his highly original system of esthetics. During his holidays each year in Country Sligo (the "Yeats Country" of modern tourism), the mysterious wildness and beauty of western Ireland made a deep impression. At the age of 19, Yeats enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, intending to become a painter. Here he formed a lifelong friendship with the poet "AE" (George Russell), and a year later they founded the Dublin Hermetic Society. In 1887 Yeats joined the Theosophical Society of London and also became literary correspondent for two American newspapers.

Among his acquaintances at this time were his father's artist and writer friends, including William Morris, William Ernest Henley, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Important Friendships In 1889 the Fenian party leader, John O'Leary, introduced Yeats to the woman who became the greatest single influence on his life and poetry, Maud Gonne. A passionate and beautiful woman, fiercely involved in the politics of Irish independence, she was Yeats's first and deepest love. She admired his poetry but rejected his repeated offers of marriage, choosing instead to marry Maj. John MacBride, later executed by the British government for his part in the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Maud Gonne came to represent for Yeats the ideal of feminine beauty (she appears as Helen of Troy in several of his poems), but a beauty disfigured and wasted by what Yeats considered an unsuitable marriage and her involvement in a hopeless political cause. 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.

During this period he formed some of the most important friendships of his life. Mrs. Olivia Shakespeare, whom he met in 1894, became his confidante; John Millington Synge, to whom he was introduced in 1896, later shared the co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre with Yeats; and Lady Augusta Gregory, whom he met in 1896, completed the feminine trinity of friendships of which Yeats later wrote in the poem "Friends": "Three women that have wrought/ What joy is in my days." For 20 years Yeats spent his summers as Lady Gregory's quest at Coole Park, her home in Galway. Her son, Maj. Robert Gregory, a young painter who died in World War I, and her nephew, Hugh Lane, an art collector, both figured prominently in the poems of Yeats's later period. The young American poet Ezra Pound, the instigator of the imagist and vorticist movements in modern poetry, came to London expressly to meet Yeats in 1909. Pound later married Mrs.

Shakespear's daughter Dorothy, and he served as Yeats's secretary off and on between 1912 and 1916. Pound introduced Yeats to the Japanese No drama, which gave a distinctive discipline and mood - ceremonial formality and symbolism - to Yeats's verse dramas. His poetry during this period began to show the hardness, brevity, and conciseness that characterize the best poems of his final period. The death of Maud Gonne's husband seemed to offer promise that she might now accept Yeats's proposal of marriage. Upon her final refusal in 1917, he proposed to her daughter, Iseult MacBride, only to be rejected by her too. That same year he married Miss George Hyde-Less, daughter of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family. Soon after their wedding, his wife developed the power of automatic writing and began to utter phrases of a strange doctrine, seemingly dictated by spirits from another world, in her sleep. Yeats copied down these fragments and incorporated them into his occult esthetic system, published as A Vision in 1925.

A daughter, Anne Butler Yeats, was born in 1919, and a son, William Michael, 2 years later. Poet and Dramatist Yeats's first book of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, was published in 1889. In the long title poem, he began his celebration of the ancient Irish heroes Oisin, Finn, Aengus, and St. Patrick. This interest was evident also in his collection of Irish folklore: Fairy and Folk Tales (1888). His long verse drama, The Countess Cathleen (1892), drew criticism because of its unorthodox theology, but it represents a successful fusion in dramatic form of ancient beliefs with modern Irish history. His collection of romantic tales and mood sketches, The Celtic Twilight (1893), attracted the attention of folklore collectors, among them Lady Gregory, who dated her interest in Yeats from her reading of this volume. Yeats's The Secret Rose (1897) includes poems that he called personal, occult, and Irish, and it contains his rose and tree symbols based on Rosicrucian and Cabalistic doctrines.

More figures from ancient Irish history and legend appeared in this volume: King Fergus, Conchubar the Red Branch King, and Yeats's most powerful hero, Cuchulain. The Wind among the Reeds (1899) won the Royal Academy Prize as the best book of poems published that year. An important milestone in the history of the modern theater occurred in 1902, when Yeats, Maud Gonne, Douglas Hyde, and George Russell founded the Irish National Theatre Society, out of which grew the Abbey Theatre Company in 1904. Yeats's experience with the theater gave to his volume of poems In the Seven Woods (1907) a new style - less elaborate, less romantic, and more matter-of-fact in language and imagery. These changes were less noticeable in the play contained in this volume, On Baile's Strand. His play The Green Helmet, contained in a volume of poems published in 1910 by his sister's press, still exhibited his preoccupation with ancient royalty and "half-forgotten things," but his poetry was unmistakably new.

Yeats's play At the Hawk's Well, written and produced in 1915, showed the influence of Japanese No drama in its use of masks and in its dances by a Japanese choreographer. From 1918 to 1923 Yeats and his wife lived in a restored tower at Ballylee (Galway), of which the poet said, "I declare this tower is my symbol." Signifying restored tradition, ancient yet modern, nobility, aristocracy, and masculinity, the tower became a prominent symbol in his best poems, notably in those that make up The Tower (1928). Because Yeats based his esthetic on the principle of opposites, his personal life was made complete when he officially became the "smiling public man" of his poem "Among School Children" through two events: he was elected an Irish senator in 1922, a post he filled conscientiously until his retirement in 1928; and he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. His acceptance of the role and its responsibilities had been foreshadowed in his poems Responsibilities (1914).

The outbreak of civil war in Ireland in 1922 had heightened his conviction that the artist must lead the way through art, rather than through politics, to a harmonious ordering of chaos. Esthetic Theories and Systems 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." Last Works Yeats's last plays, Purgatory (1938) and The Death of Cuchulain (1938), also presaged his own death, which occurred on Jan. 28, 1939, in Roquebrune, France, where ill health had forced him into semiretirement. His final volumes of poems were The Winding Stair (1933), A Full Moon in March (1935), and New Poems (1938). His Last Poems (1940) brought Cuchulain from the grave into a realm beyond death, and this volume included Yeats's last poem, "Under Ben Bulben," in which he dictated the epitaph that adorns the headstone of his grave in Drumcliffe Churchyard (Sligo): "Cast a cold eye on life on death.

Horseman, pass by!" ~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~ Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939), poet, playwright, founder of the Abbey Theatre, and driving force of the Irish literary revival; born in Dublin, the son of John Butler Yeats, a portrait-painter whose own father was a Church of Ireland clergyman. Yeats's mother, Susan Pollexfen, came from a Sligo family that owned mills and a small shipping company. From 1867 to 1872 the Yeatses lived mainly in London, from 1872 to 1874 in Sligo, then in London again from 1874 to 1881. Yeats went to the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin, 1881-3. In 1884 he entered the Metropolitan School of Art, and met George Russell. In 1885 he met John O'Leary, who introduced him to translations of Irish literature into English.

Stimulated by reading Standish James O'Grady's histories and fictions, he determined to give the legends and mythology of Ireland new literary expression by writing poetry about Irish places. At the same time his interest in Indian thought and theosophy led him to the Dublin Hermetic Society. His first volume, Mosada: A Dramatic Poem, appeared in 1886. The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), a long poem based on the Fionn cycle, was published in the year when ‘the troubling of his life’ began in the meeting with Maud Gonne. In 1892 Yeats wrote his play The Countess Cathleen for her, and addressed to her over the years many wistful love-poems. The marriage proposal that he made in 1891 was refused. In 1890 he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; interested in magic, astrology, and the Cabbala, he made a study of Blake (whose poems he edited with Edwin J. Ellis in three volumes, 1893), as well as reading Swedenborg.

His Representative Irish Tales and John Sherman and Dhoya were published in 1891, the year of Parnell's death. He began planning a new Irish Literary Society in London, hoping that a cultural revival could be launched. In the following June in Dublin he inaugurated the National Literary Society at a meeting in the Rotunda. Irish Fairy Tales and The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics were published in 1892. In this period his poetry became more obscure, while a collection entitled The Celtic Twilight (1893) gave its name to the kind of poetry then being produced by imitators. This ‘Celtic’ poetry reached its ultimate development in the symbolic lyrics of his The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Having first met Lady Gregory in London during 1894 he visited her at Coole Park, her country house in Co. Galway in 1896 and spent long periods there during the summer for many years. Coole provided Yeats with a peaceful routine, and he did much work there, Lady Gregory rekindling his interest in folk tales and peasant speech.

While staying at Coole in the summer of 1897, Yeats planned the Irish Literary Theatre with Lady Gregory, and another Co. Galway land owner, Edward Martyn at Duras House, in Kinvara [see Abbey Theatre]. Yeats became a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to please Maud Gonne, but soon grew disillusioned with revolutionaries, especially after the Dublin riots of 1897. In 1902, Maud Gonne acted in the title-role of Cathleen Ni Houlihan, a play which made a great impression on Irish nationalists, causing Yeats to wonder later in reference to the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising if it had ‘sent out certain men the English shot’. He was shattered by her sudden marriage to John MacBride in 1903, but continued to write love poetry to and about her. As President of the Irish National Dramatic Society, and Director of the Abbey Theatre, Yeats was deeply immersed in theatre policy and management during this period. Poems in The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914) express disillusion.

On Baile's Strand (1904) was the first of his plays about the Irish hero Cï¿½ Chulainn. An inveterate letter-writer, he also composed many essays: Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) and Discoveries (1907) were followed in 1916 by Reveries over Childhood and Youth, being the first part of Autobiographies. His continuing interest in aristocratic art was reflected in imitations of the Japanese Noh, and 1916 saw a production of At the Hawk's Well, the first of his Four Plays for Dancers (1921). When the 1916 Rising took place in Dublin, Yeats realized that the Irish leaders executed for their part in it had been transformed into national martyrs through the ‘terrible beauty’ of their sacrifice. Among them was John MacBride.

Yeats went to Normandy, where Maud Gonne was living with Seï¿½n (born 1904), her son by MacBride, and Iseult (1894-1954), her second child by Lucien Millevoye, a French right-wing politician. There he proposed marriage, was refused, and next proposed to Iseult, who gave no definite answer. In 1917, on receiving a final refusal, he turned to Georgie Hyde Lees, whom he married in 1917. Marriage transformed Yeats's life. His wife's automatic writing underpinned the views on history and human personality sketched in the prose Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918) and which he systematized in A Vision (1925). Ownership of Thoor Ballylee, a medieval tower in Co. Galway, and of a town house at 82 Merrion Square gave him the sense of being rooted in Ireland.

He became a senator of the Irish Free State [see Irish State] in 1922, chairing the committee on the new Irish coinage, and later causing a controversy with his defence of divorce in June 1925. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Of the collections in this period, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) included a bleak vision of the future in ‘The Second Coming’, and praise of ceremony in ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’. The magnificent poems of The Tower (1928) focused on legends surrounding Thoor Ballylee, the problem of age, inherited characteristics, civil war, and love. The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) continued this rhetorical poetry. Various medical conditions took their toll, though Yeats's output continued impressively with Collected Poems (1933), Collected Plays (1934), Wheels and Butterflies (1934), A Full Moon in March (1935), and Dramatis Personae (1935).

After editing The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Yeats revised A Vision (1937), published New Poems (1938), planned On the Boiler (1939) and composed Purgatory and The Death of Cuchulain. Riversdale became his last Irish residence in 1932. He died at Roquebrune, Cap Martin in the South of France. The leading literary figure in Ireland in his time, who virtually invented modern Irish literature in English, and one of the greatest modern poets in any language, Yeats has cast a long shadow. See: A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: Man and Poet (1948); and R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life (1997 and 2001). ~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~ Irish poet and playwright, b. Dublin.

The greatest lyric poet Ireland has produced and one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, Yeats was the acknowledged leader of the Irish literary renaissance. Early Life Son of the painter John Butler Yeats, William studied painting in Dublin (1883–86). As a boy he attended school in London and spent vacations in County Sligo, Ireland, which was the setting for many of his poems. He became fascinated by Irish legends and by the occult. His first work, the drama Mosada (1886), reflects his concern with magic, but the long poems in The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) voiced the intense nationalism of the Young Ireland movement. Poetry: First Period Yeats's verse can be divided into two periods, the first lasting from 1886 to about 1900. The poetry of this period shows a debt to Spenser, Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelites. It centres on Irish mythology and themes and is mystical, slow-paced, and lyrical.

Among the best-known poems of the period are “Falling of Leaves,” “When You Are Old,” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Yeats edited William Blake's works in 1893, and his own Poems were collected in 1895. Drama and Prose Yeats's efforts to foster Irish nationalism were inspired for years by Maud Gonne, an Irish patriot for whom he had a hopeless passion and to whom he repeatedly and fruitlessly proposed marriage. In 1898 with Lady Augusta Gregory, George Moore, and Edward Martyn he founded the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin; their first production (1899) was Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (written 1889–92). Yeats helped produce plays and collaborated with Lady Gregory on the comedy The Pot of Broth (1929) and other plays. The Irish Literary Theatre produced several of Yeats's plays including Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), and—after the Abbey Theatre was opened—The Hour Glass (1904), The Land of Heart's Desire (1904), and Deirdre (1907).

Yeats's prose tales of Irish legend were collected in The Celtic Twilight (1893) and in the symbolic The Secret Rose (1897). Poetry: Second Period, and Later Life Yeats's poetry deepened as he grew older. In the verse of his middle and late years he renounced his early transcendentalism; his poetry became stronger, more physical and realistic. A recurring theme is the polarity between extremes such as the physical and the spiritual, the real and the imagined. Memorable poems from this period include “The Second Coming,” “The Tower,” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” Yeats initiated his second period in such volumes as In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910). In 1917 he married Bertha Georgiana Hyde-Lees (known as Georgie or George), and his occultism was encouraged by his wife's automatic writing. His prose work A Vision (1937; privately printed 1926) is the basis of much of his poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) and Four Plays for Dancers (1921).

Yeats ultimately became a respected public figure, a member (1922–28) of the Irish senate, and winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. Some of his best work was his last, The Tower (1928) and Last Poems (1940). All of Yeats's work shows interesting and important revisions from earlier to later versions (see The Variorum Edition of his poems, ed. by Peter Allt and Russell R. Alspach, 1957). William Butler Yeats Essay - Yeats, William Butler - eNotes.com William Butler Yeats Essay - Yeats, William Butler Navigate Study Guiderows link Link William Butler Yeats 1865–1939 Irish poet, dramatist, essayist, critic, short story writer, and autobiographer. See also Sailing to Byzantium Criticism and The Second Coming Criticism. Yeats is considered one of the greatest poets in the English language. He was devoted to the cause of Irish nationalism and played an important part in the Celtic Revival Movement, promoting the literary heritage of Ireland through his use of material from ancient Irish sagas.

Further, Yeats employed national themes in his poetry, thereby attempting to restore the cultural unity that he felt was needed to bring an end to Ireland's internal division and suffering. Magic and occult theory were also important elements in Yeats's work. Yeats viewed the poet as kindred to the magician and the alchemist; thus he was deeply interested in spiritualism, theosophy, and occult systems. Many of the images found in his poetry are in fact derived from Rosicrucianism as well as from his own occult researches, which are described in his prose work A Vision. Biographical Information Yeats was born in Dublin to Irish-Protestant parents. His father was a painter who influenced his son's thoughts about art. Yeats's mother shared with her son her interests in folklore, fairies, and astrology as well as her love of Ireland, particularly the region surrounding Sligo in western Ireland where Yeats spent much of his childhood. Yeats's formal education began when he was eleven years old with his attendance at school first in England, then Ireland. As a youth he was erratic in his studies, shy and prone to daydreaming. In 1884 Yeats enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin.

There he met the poet George Russell, who shared Yeats's enthusiasm for dreams and visions. Together they founded the Dublin Hermetic Society for the purposes of conducting magical experiments and "to promote the study of Oriental Religions and Theosophy." Yeats also joined the Rosicrucians, the Theosophical Society, and MacGregor Mather's Order of the Golden Dawn. He frequently consulted spiritualists and engaged in the ritual conjuring of Irish gods. In 1885, Yeats met the Irish nationalist John O'Leary, who was instrumental in arranging for the publication of Yeats's first poems in The Dublin University Review and in directing Yeats's attention to native Irish sources for subject matter. Under the influence of O'Leary, Yeats took up the cause of Gaelic writers at a time when much native Irish literature was in danger of being lost as the result of England's attempts to anglicize Ireland through a ban on the Gaelic language. In 1889, Yeats met the actress Maud Gonne, an agitator for the nationalist cause, whose great beauty and reckless destructiveness in pursuit of her political goals both intrigued and dismayed him.

He accompanied her to political rallies, and though he often disagreed with her extremist tactics, he shared her desire to see Ireland freed from English domination. Although Gonne's repeated refusals to marry Yeats brought him great personal unhappiness, their relationship endured through many estrangements, and nearly all of Yeats's love poetry is addressed to her. In 1917 when he was fifty-two years old, Yeats married Georgiana Hyde-Lees. Through his young wife's experiments with automatic writing, Yeats gathered the materials on which he based A Vision, his explanation of historical cycles and his theory of human personality based on the phases of the moon. In 1922, after decades of struggle by the Irish nationalists had finally culminated in the passage of the Home Rule Bill, Yeats became a senator forthe Irish Free State. He left the senate in 1928 because of failing health and devoted his remaining years to poetry. He died in France in 1939.

Major Works Yeats's poetry evolved over five decades from the vague imagery and uncertain rhythms of The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems, his first important work, to the forceful, incantatory verse of the Last Poems. Throughout his career, Yeats found occult research a rich source of images for his poetry, and traces of his esoteric interests appear everywhere in his poems. "The Rose upon the Rood of Time," for example, takes its central symbol from Rosicrucianism, and "All Souls' Night" describes a scrying, or divination, ceremony. In his earliest poetic works, such as Mosada, Yeats took his symbols from Greek mythology; however, after meeting John O'Leary, he turned instead to Irish mythology as a source for his images. The long narrative poem, "The Wanderings of Oisin," was the first he based on the legend of an Irish hero. In spite of its self-consciously poetic language and immature imitations of Pre-Raphaelite poetic technique, the poem's theme—the disagreement between Oisin and St. Patrick—makes it important to an understanding of the later Yeats.

The sense of conflict between vision and corporeal realities, as symbolized by the saint and the hero, is the essential dichotomy in Yeats's poetry. Additionally, Yeats recog nized that only through imagination could the raw materials of life be transformed into something enduring. For Yeats, the role of the artist was the same as that of the alchemist: he must effect a transformation that obscures the distinction between form and content, between the "dancer and the dance." This theme is most effectively expressed in the later poems "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Byzantium." As Yeats grew older and more sure of his themes, his approach to the techniques of poetry changed. Recognizing that faerie songs were less suited to the tragic themes that preoccupied him than were more realistic narratives, he began, with the poems of In the Seven Woods, to write verses describing actual events in his personal life or in the history of Ireland, One of his most famous lyrics, "Easter 1916," about a rebel uprising that resulted in the martyrdom of all who participated, belongs to this later group. In his maturity, Yeats wrote little narrative poetry.

Instead he adopted the dramatic lyric as his most characteristic form of expression. Influenced by Ezra Pound, he simplified his diction and modified his syntax to reflect more closely the constructions of common speech, and in works such as Responsibilities, and Other Poems, The Wild Swans at Coole, and Michael Robartes and the Dancer, his verses began to take on the rhetorical, occasionally haughty tone that readers today identify as characteristically Yeatsian. Critics agree that Yeats's poetic technique was impeccable. It was this mastery of technique that enabled him to perfect the subtle, forceful, and highly unusual poetic meter that he used to create the effect of a chant or an incantation in such poems as "The Tower." His remarkable creative development in his final years illustrates a lifelong determination to remake himself into his ideal image of the poet: a sacerdotal figure who assumes the role of mediator between the conflicting forces of the objective and subjective worlds. Critical Reception Yeats's interest in Irish politics and his visionary approach to poetry often confounded his contemporaries and set him at odds with the intellectual trends of his time.

His intent interest in subjects that others labeled archaic and perceived as an affront to their modernity delayed his recognition among his peers. Nonetheless, Yeats's poetic achievement stands at the center of modern literature. By the beginning of the twentieth century he was recognized as the best English-language, Symbolist poet while also considered to be the foremost Celtic revivalist poet. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923, though at the time of his death in 1939, his views on poetry were regarded as eccentric by students and critics alike. This attitude held sway in spite of critical awareness of the beauty and technical proficiency of his verse. Yeats had long opposed the notion that literature should serve society. As a youthful critic he had refused to praise the poor lyrics of the "Young Ireland" poets merely because they were effective as nationalist propaganda. In maturity, he found that despite his success, his continuing conviction that poetry should express the spiritual life of the individual estranged him from those who believed that a modern poet must take as his themes social alienation and the barrenness of materialist culture.

As Kathleen Raine wrote of him: "Against a rising tide of realism, political verse and University wit, Yeats upheld the innocent and the beautiful, the traditional and the noble," and, as a consequence of his disregard for the concerns of the modern world, was often misunderstood. However, as critics became disenchanted with modern poetic trends, Yeats's romantic dedication to the laws of the imagination and art for art's sake became more acceptable. Indeed, critics today are less concerned with the validity of Yeats's occult and visionary theories than with their symbolic value as expressions of timeless ideals, considering his interest in arcana as a manifestation of the truth of Wallace Stevens's statement that "poets are never of the world in which they live." More Content: Yeats, William Butler (hide) William Butler Yeats, horoscope for birth date 13 June 1865, born in Dublin, with Astrodatabank biography - Astro-Databank William Butler Yeats Biography Irish writer, a poet and dramatist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He was first published at age 21 with elaborate early work.

As Yeats became noted as a poet and novelist, his works became more simplified, while his own philosophy developed in complexity. His most noted works included "The Wind Among the Reeds," 1899, "Responsibilities," 1912 and "The Tower," 1927. The complex man was at once courteous and self-centered, gregarious, and spiritually and intellectually questing. He was a hobby astrologer with a very active interest in mysticism. At the same time, he believed that "the sexual principle lies at the heart of all behavior as well as history." His lovers were a spur to his poetry, taking him and his readers to a brink "beyond human notes nor words to dwell upon the soul's destiny." On 1/30/1889, he met Maud Gonne at his dad's shabby house in Bedford Park, London. A tentative, dreamy 23, he later wrote that "the trembling of my life began." Though only a few months younger than he, Maud was already involved in the welfare of the cause of Irish nationalism.

She came to the Yeats home with a letter from an old friend, and was so sophisticated that she actually traveled by a hansom cab which she instructed to wait outside. It was said by no less than George Bernard Shaw that Maud was "outrageously beautiful." Yeats wrote, "But even at the starting post, all sleek and new, I saw the wildness in her." For 30 years Yeats dreamed of marrying Maud, initially blind to the fact that she carried another man's child soon after they met. They remained friends with an erotic overtone; indeed reporting dreams in which they were sated by each other's love and entering a "spiritual marriage" in 1898. Yet each time he proposed marriage, he was refused. Their spiritual marriage did descend from the astral into the physical bed in 1906 when they managed to spend a night together. Apparently reality did not approach the imaginary, as the episode was not repeated. Yeats, at 52, felt an astrological imperative to be wed by October 1917.

He had transferred his love for Maud Gonne to an adoration of Maud's 22-year-old daughter, Iseult, and felt that she should be his bride. Despite their strong friendship, she, as her mother before her, said no to his pleas. At short notice, he chose Bertha Georgie Hyde-Lees, a 25-year-old English girl, "strikingly beautiful in a barbaric way." He had known her for years and attended séances together. Georgie had been sponsored by Yeats into the Hermetic Order of the Golden dawn, a secret society of mystics devoted to the rituals of magic. Moreover, she had her own secret voices telling her they might marry. Though Yeats did have pre-marital jitters, "fearing that the malice of Neptune was at work," they married on 10/21/1917. Georgie immediately began her work of automatic writing, penning messages from the spirit masters, her "controls," eventually filling 3,600 pages of script.

She was wife, secretary, medium and scribe, as well as mother, giving birth to their daughter, Anne, February 1919 and their son, Michael, in August 1921. Eventually she tired of her mystic role and went into retreat. As the busy household absorbed her time, her conversations with the spirit world ceased. They moved between Galway and Dublin where Yeats wrote and revised incessantly, plays, poems, articles. He ran the Abbey Theatre, became a senator of the Irish Free State and disavowed his republican inclinations. His somewhat astrological work, "A Vision," 1925, resulted from a collaboration with his wife. Georgie's automatic writings fueled the work that involves a unique approach to the twenty-eight phases of the Moon. The Yeats children went to boarding school and Yeats and Georgie moved to Rathfarnam, where he could be insulated from the excitement of theatre and politics. For his health they began to winter on the French and Italian Riviera's. Georgie began to feel dispensable, more so as Yeats' dreams had begun to be of young women.

There followed a succession of English ladies and among Dublin gossipmongers, Yeats was said to have gone "sex-mad." After a variety of liaisons, he met 53-year-old Edith Shackleton Heald, in whom he found a blend of spiritual virtue, intense desire and poetic inspiration. His last days were spent with Georgie, but with Edith nearby for his recreation and inspiration. The two women sat together with him when he fell into a coma, Yeats died on 1/28/1939 near Nice, France. In his last months, he wrote his own epitaph - "Cast a cold eye On Life, on death. Horseman, pass by!" chart Placidus Equal_H. Source Notes LMR quotes Sheila Lindsay in Dublin, 1990, who had a letter from Yeat's son and daughter-in-law with the time that was written in the family Bible. He was born in Sandymount, a suburb of Dublin. The data was on a horoscope in his own hand found among his papers. He was an astrologer, but did not like to do his own math.

Fagan gives the same data in AA, 1/1964, probably from Yeats personally as they were acquainted. Same data from Willbie in "Yeats, A Heroic Harvest" Sy Scholfield notes that Yeats' astrological chart in his own handwriting showing 10:40pm is reproduced in the article, "W. B. Yeats' map in his own hand," by Elizabeth Heine, Biography 1.3 (Summer 1978), p. 38. Brenda Maddox, "Yeat's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats," HarperCollins. Categories

Question: What were the first names of the Irish poet and dramatist W B Yeats?
Answer: William Butler