WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: IRISH LEGENDS BECOME POETRY

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served as an Irish Senator for two terms.

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. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeats's debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 

More information: Poetry Foundation

From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. 

Yeats was raised a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, which was at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. While his family was broadly supportive of the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage, and informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. 

A book signed by William B. Yeats

Yeats's childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power-shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy. The 1880s saw the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement; the 1890s saw the momentum of nationalism, while the Catholics became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments had a profound effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his country's biography.

n 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore began the Irish Literary Theatre to hold Irish and Celtic plays. The ideals of the Abbey were derived from the avant-garde French theatre, which sought to express the ascendancy of the playwright rather than the actor-manager à l'anglais. 

The group's manifesto, which Yeats wrote, declared, We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted & imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory ... & that freedom to experiment which is not found in the theatres of England, & without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed.

In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation. He was aware of the symbolic value of an Irish winner so soon after Ireland had gained independence, and sought to highlight the fact at each available opportunity. 

His reply to many of the letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe's welcome to the Free State.

He died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939, aged 73.

More information: Nobel Prize Organization

We are happy when for everything inside us 

there is a corresponding something outside us. 

William Butler Yeats