William Butler Yeats
BiographyWilliam Butler Yeats (13 June 1865–28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature, a pillar of the Irish literary establishment, and in later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was born in Sandymount, Ireland, and educated there and in London. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Much of Yeats’s life and poetry was preoccupied with his lifelong unrequited love for Maud Gonne, an ardent Irish Nationalist more sympathetic to the radical element than Yeats, who ended up marrying Irish nationalist John MacBride after rejecting three marriage proposals from Yeats. She seems to have returned his affection emotionally but preferred to keep their affair platonic. Although they eventually consumated their relationship in Paris in 1908, that was the end of that. Maud still preferred a platonic friendship. Feeling his mortality and desiring an heir, in 1917 Yeats married Georgie Hyde Lees, a woman half his age, and the marriage to everybody’s surprise was a successful one. They had two children, Anne and Michael. Unfortunately Georgie got him interested in automatic writing, a practice which produced volumnous numbers of manuscripts of dubious worth, and resulted in his 1925 book of alternate history and philosophy, A Vision.
He died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, aged 73, his epitaph taken from the last lines of “Under Ben Bulben,” one of his final poems:
Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!
Bibliography
The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)
The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892)
The Land of Heart's Desire (play) (1894)
The Secret Rose (fiction) (1897)
The Shadowy Waters (1900)
Cathleen Ní Houlihan (play) (1902)
Ideas of Good and Evil (non-fiction) (1903)
In the Seven Woods (1903)
Where There is Nothing (play) (1903)
The Hour Glass (play) (1903)
Discoveries (non-fiction) (1907)
Synge and the Ireland of his Time (non-fiction) (1911)
Poems Written in Discouragement (1913)
Responsibilities, and Other Poems (1916)
Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (non-fiction) (1916)
Michael Robartes And The Dancer (1920)
Later Poems (1922)
The Cat and the Moon, and Certain Poems (1924)
A Vision (1925) (many later revisions)
The Tower (1928)
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
New Poems (1938)