Yeats, William Butler

Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), born in Dublin, the eldest son of J. B. Yeats and brother of Jack Yeats, both celebrated painters. He studied at the School of Art in Dublin, where with a fellow student, G. Russell (Æ), he developed an interest in mystic religion and the supernatural. At 21 he abandoned art in favour of literature, writing John Sherman and Dhoya (1891) and editing The Poems of William Blake (1893), The Works of William Blake (with F. J. Ellis, 3 vols, 1893), and Poems of Spenser (1906). A nationalist, he applied himself to the creation of an Irish national theatre, an achievement which, with the help of Lady Gregory and others, was partly realized in 1899 when his play The Countess Cathleen (1892) was acted in Dublin. The English actors engaged by the Irish Literary Theatre gave place in 1902 to an Irish amateur company, which produced Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan in that year. The Irish National Theatre Company was thereafter created, and, with the help of Miss A. E. Horniman, acquired the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Yeats's early study of Irish lore and legends resulted in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), The Celtic Twilight (1893), and The Secret Rose (1897). Irish traditional and nationalist themes and the poet's unrequited love for Maude Gonne, a beautiful and ardent revolutionary, provided much of the subject matter for The Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems (1889), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), The Wind among the Reeds (1899), The Shadowy Waters (1900), and such of his later plays as On Baile's Strand (1904) and Deirdre (1907).

With each succeeding collection of poems Yeats moved further from the elaborate, Pre-Raphaelite style of the 1890s. In the Seven Woods (1903) was followed by The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), Poems Written in Discouragement (1913), Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914), and The Wild Swans at Coole (1917). In 1917 he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who on their honeymoon attempted automatic writing, an event that exercised a profound effect on his life and work. His wife's ‘communicators’ ultimately provided him with the system of symbolism described in A Vision (1925) and underlying many of the poems in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Seven Poems and a Fragment (1922), The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems (1924), October Blast (1927), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair (1929), Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932), Wheels and Butterflies (1934), A Full Moon in March (1935), New Poems (1938), and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939). In the poems and plays written after his marriage he achieved a spare, colloquial lyricism wholly unlike his earlier manner.

Yeats served as a senator of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928, and in 1923 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Yeats also published collections of essays and edited many books including The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), a somewhat eccentric and personal selection. He wrote good letters and five major collections have been made. Posthumous publications include Collected Poems (1950), Collected Plays (1952), Autobiographies (1955), The Variorum Edition of the Poems (1957), Mythologies (1959), Essays and Introductions (1961), The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats (1961), and Explorations (1962).