Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)

Irish poet and dramatist, leader of the movement of the Irish Renaissance. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, William Blake, Shelley, French Symblolism, Maeterlinck, and Hindu occultism, he is known for his poems and plays dealing with mystic and Celtic legendary themes, and for the highly developed symbolism of his later poetry. Among his books of poetry are The Wanderings of Oisin ( 1889); The Wind Among the Reeds ( 1899); In the Seven Woods ( 1903); The Green Helmet ( 1910); The Wild Swans of Coole ( 1919); The Tower ( 1928); The Winding Stair ( 1929); A Full Moon in March ( 1935); The King of the Great Clock Tower ( 1934); Wheels and Butterflies ( 1934). His dramatic works include: The Countess Kathleen ( 1892); The Land of Heart's Desire ( 1894); The Shadowy Waters ( 1900); Cathleen ni Houlihan ( 1902); The Hour Glass ( 1903); The King's Threshold ( 1904); Deirdre ( 1907); Four Plays for Dancers ( 1921); Plays in Prose and Verse ( 1923); The Herne's Egg ( 1938); Last Poems and Two Plays ( 1939). Miscellaneous prose works include John Sherman ( 1891), The Celtic Twilight ( 1893), The Secret Rose ( 1897), and Stories of Red Hanrahan ( 1904), collections of stories, tales, and sketches; Ideas of Good and Evil ( 1903), Per Amica Silentia Lunae ( 1918), The Cutting of an Agate ( 1919), Essays ( 1924 and 1937), and On the Boiler ( 1939), all books of essays; A Vision ( 1925), on spiritualism; Letters to the New Island ( 1934), criticism; Autobiography ( 1938), consisting of Reveries over Childhood and Youth ( 1915), The Trembling of the Veil ( 1922), and Dramatis Personae ( 1935); If I Were Four and Twenty ( 1940).

Yeats was the son of John Butler Yeats, a well-known Irish landscape painter, and he himself studied painting for three years. Early in his career he was associated with a group of English "Decadent" poets including Dowson, Henley, and Arthur Symons and Lionel Johnson, members of the Rhymers' Club; he was invited to come to London, the headquarters of the group, by Oscar Wilde. Yeats is credited with having been the prime mover in the Irish literary revival of the end of the 19th century, persuading Lady Gregory, George Moore, and John M. Synge to write about their native country and helping to found both the Irish Literary Society (in London and Dublin) and the Irish Literary Theater, which became the celebrated Abbey Theater. He did not approve of the realism of the plays of Sean O'Casey which the Abbey Theater later sponsored, however. Yeats was honored widely as one of the most important poets of the 20th century, being elected a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922 and in 1923 being awarded the Nobel prize for literature. In appearance and behavior he was eccentric, foppish, dreamy, melancholy, and absent-minded, being subject to hallucinations and trance-like states since youth. He was a fervent believer in spiritualism, and his wife, Georgie Lees, was a medium who held daily séances.