Yeats, W. B.

Yeats, W. B. (1865–1939). Dublin-born poet, dramatist, and essayist. His early years were spent in England where his painter father introduced him to William Morris and his circle. The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) reveals a late Romantic fired with enthusiasm for things Irish though his relationship with the nationalists remained equivocal, too much so for his more committed first love, Maud Gonne. He preferred to associate himself with the Anglo-Irish, ‘bound neither to Cause nor to State … the people of Burke and Grattan’. Though in England at the time of the Easter Rising, in poetry he recorded its ‘terrible beauty’. An inveterate myth-maker, his lifelong addiction to the occult was tempered by involvement in public affairs, the resulting tensions evident in his best volume The Tower (1928). By now honoured with the Nobel prize and a seat in the Senate, he had little liking for de Valera's Ireland. As the 1930s drew on, he contemplated the coming cataclysm with savage satisfaction.

John Saunders