Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family’s summer house at Connaught. William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 in the seaside village of Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo, in western Ireland. William Butler Yeats (Sadymount, Dublin mellett, 1865. június 13. Yeats’s work of this period takes its strength from his long and dedicated apprenticeship to poetry; from his experiments in a wide range of forms of poetry, drama, and prose; and from his spiritual growth and his gradual acquisition of personal wisdom, which he incorporated into the framework of his own mythology. Yeats avoided what he considered the obscurity of Blake, whose poetic images came from mystical visions rather than from the familiar physical world. Maud Gonne had moved to Paris with her husband, exiled Irish revolutionary John MacBride, and the author was left without her encouragement. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. His was also an important figure in European literary Modernism in the 1920s and ’30s. I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead. The energy of the poems written in response to these disturbing times gave astonishing power to his collection The Tower (1928), which is often considered his best single book, though The Wild Swans at Coole (1917; enlarged edition, 1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower, The Winding Stair (1929); enlarged edition, 1933), and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932), also possess considerable merit. View the list It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter. Written in 1919 soon after the end of World War I, it describes a deeply mysterious and powerful alternative to the Christian idea of the Second Coming—Jesus's prophesied return to the Earth as a savior announcing the Kingdom of Heaven. William Butler Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, was a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. Yeats found that within each 2,000-year era, emblematic moments occurred at the midpoints of the 1000-year halves. 81 Copy quote. Most members of this minority considered themselves English people who happened to have been born in Ireland, but Yeats staunchly affirmed his Irish nationality. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland. Through both parents Yeats (pronounced “Yates”) claimed kinship with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families who are mentioned in his work. Gonne shared Yeats’s interest in occultism and spiritualism. Malins, Edward Greenway, and John Arthur Purkis. Yeats and his wife held more than 400 sessions of automatic writing, producing nearly 4,000 pages that Yeats avidly and patiently studied and organized. There he wrote poems, plays, novels, and short stories—all with Irish characters and scenes. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. A late film critic on his longstanding love of poetry. Pound was then editing translations of the nō plays of Japan, and Yeats was greatly excited by them. 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. Nane jeh ny fir toshee jeh lught ooasle lettyraght Hostyn as Nerin, v'eh ny hannadeyr ayns Seanad Éireann er … In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne, an Irish beauty, ardent and brilliant. The success of these productions led to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society with Yeats as president. He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland since at least the end of the 17th century. Yeats’s last two verse collections, New Poems and Last Poems and Two Plays, appeared in 1938 and 1939 respectively. Omissions? 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. 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. 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. The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, ed. During this decade he also became increasingly interested in poetic techniques. Some think he was the greatest poet of the twentieth century. The vacuum left by politics might be filled, he felt, by literature, art, poetry, drama, and legend. There he devised, with Lady Gregory and her neighbor Edward Martyn, plans for promoting an innovative, native Irish drama. 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. He hoped to instill pride in the Irish past and support Irish nationalism. He laid out his unpopular opinions in late plays such as Purgatory (1938) and the essays of On the Boiler (1939). His work has been widely circulated and anthologised. William Butler Yeats first appears, in the memories of his contemporaries, as a rarefied human being: a tall, dark-visaged young man who walked … Confronting and coping with uncharted terrains through poetry. Yeats died in January 1939 while abroad. William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. For example, in “A Coat,” written in 1912, Yeats derided his 1890s poetic style, saying that he had once adorned his poems with a coat “covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies.” The poem concludes with a brash announcement: “There’s more enterprise / In walking naked.” This departure from a conventional 19th-century manner disappointed his contemporary readers, who preferred the pleasant musicality of such familiar poems as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which he wrote in 1890. In addition, he produced book reviews, usually on Irish topics. Another important element of poems in both these collections and other volumes is Yeats’s keen awareness of old age. Born: 13 June 1865, Dublin, Ireland. When You Are Old, He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven, A Crazed Girl MacBride, who was now separated from Gonne, participated in the rebellion and was executed afterward. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo, western Ireland. William Butler Yeats was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Final arrangements for his burial in Ireland could not be made, so he was buried at Roquebrune, France. 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. After a wealthy sponsor volunteered to pay for the renovation of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre as the company’s permanent home, the theatre opened on December 27, 1904. Residence at the time of the award: Ireland. Poems to integrate into your English Language Arts classroom. ", “When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats, In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz, Ribh Considers Christian Love Insufficient, To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing, (And translator, with Shri Purohit Swami). As fellow poet W.H. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. As Yeats began concentrating his poetry on Irish subjects, he was compelled to accompany his family in moving to London at the end of 1886. He was a writer, known for Dancing at Lughnasa (1998), Echoes and Oedipus Rex (1957). Yeats had been a theosophist, but in 1890 he turned from its sweeping mystical insights and joined the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practiced ritual magic. 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. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin into an Irish Protestant family. William Butler Yeats, more commonly known as, W.B. He was also a world-renowned artist of impressive stature, having received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats also continued to explore mysticism. He was equally firm in adhering to his self-image as an artist. The works of William Butler Yeats form a bridge between the romantic poetry of the nineteenth century and the … Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. All are informed by the two qualities which Yeats valued and which he retained into old age—passion and joy. 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. He loved her, but she married another man. Still, some of Yeats’s greatest verse was written subsequently, appearing in The Winding Stair (1929). In 1948 his body was finally taken back to Sligo and buried in a little Protestant churchyard at Drumcliffe, as he specified in “Under Ben Bulben,” in his Last Poems, under his own epitaph: “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!”. Now a celebrated figure, he was indisputably one of the most significant modern poets. Auden noted in a 1948 Kenyon Review essay entitled “Yeats as an Example,” Yeats accepted the modern necessity of having to make a lonely and deliberate “choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which [made] sense of his experience.” Auden assigned Yeats the high praise of having written “some of the most beautiful poetry” of modern times. Most of Yeats’s poetry, however, used symbols from ordinary life and from familiar traditions, and much of his poetry in the 1890s continued to reflect his interest in Irish subjects. A member of the Anglo-Irish tradition in Ireland, he was a nationalist at heart and passionately believed in achieving an independent Ireland through cultural revolution. 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. 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. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. A Poet to His Beloved has been published with musical score by Lowell Liebermann, T. Presser, 1994. 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. These issues led to an Irish civil war, which lasted from June 1922 to May 1923. People Women’s History He had long been fascinated by the contrast between a person’s internal and external selves—between the true person and those aspects that the person chooses to present as a representation of the self. He was the eldest son of the family. During the first decade of the 20th century Yeats was extremely active in the management of the Abbey Theatre company. He was now the “sixty-year-old smiling public man” of his poem “Among School Children,” which he wrote after touring an Irish elementary school. 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. As he explained in a note included in the 1908 volume Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats: “When I first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance, but presently I convinced myself ... that I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end.” Than from the nationalist movement and celebrated an aristocratic Ireland in work by. Important element of poems in those collections use style as their subject intention of having his body buried Sligo. 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