# data[].attributes.body
| WORK/POETRY
| -      Did Yeats have any major recognitions for his poetry? -      He is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20 th century -      He won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his always inspiring poetry” (2003) -       -      How did his work evolve over time? -      You can tell that his work evolved overtime as most of his strongest works were published in his late years. -      What was his work influenced by? -      His work was inspire by William Blake, a renowned English poet who died 3 decades Before William Butler Years was born.

# data[].attributes.body
| RELATIONSHIPS
| -      What significant relationships did he have - e.g Friends, Wife, Children -      He married Georgina Hyde Lees in 1917, they had two children -      Who were his love interests? -      Maude Gonne -      Iseult Gonne (daughter) -      Georgina Hyde Lees -      Some significant events in his relationships that could influence his work -      Maude Gonne decided to marry another nationilist which left him devastated. -      Multiple rejects from Maude Gonne and her daughter Iseult Gonne

# data[].attributes.body
| BIOGRAPHY
| -      Where was he born? -      He was Born in Sandymount, Ireland -      What significant events did he live through? -      He moved to England (1867) -      Moved back to Ireland for Highschool (1880) Followed by Metropolitan School of Art -      Lived Through World War 1

# data[].attributes.body
where was he born? William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount in County Doublin, Ireland

what significant events did he live through? he lived through the momentum of nationalism which influenced his poetry heavily. he also lived through World War 1

# data[].attributes.body
what significant relationships did he have? Yeats proposed to his 'first love' Maud Gonne, but was rejected, before marrying Georgie Hyde Lees. He and Georgie had two children; Michael and Anne

who were his love interests? before marrying his wife Georgie Hyde Lees, Yeats was interested in heiress and ardent Irish nationalist, Maud Gonne

significant events in relationships which influenced his work his rejection from Maud Gonne. he experimented new methods of writing with his wife Georgie

# data[].attributes.body
did Yeats have any major recognitions for his poetry? in 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and is considered to be one of the greatest poets of his time

how did his work evolve over time? although he was a great writer for a majority of his life, his writing became more noticeably recognised towards his later years

what was his work influenced by? he was strongly influenced by other writers and his beliefs. most notably, he was influenced by poet, William Blake

# data[].attributes.body
Biography
Where was he born?
- William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland.
What significant events did he live through?
-Independence movement , 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent civil war.

# data[].attributes.body
Relationships
What significant relationships did he have?
-Yeat’s proposed to Maud Gonne many times however was rejected every time.  At the age of 51 Yeat’s married Georgie Hyde Lees they had two children, Anne and Michael.
Who were his love interests?
His love interest was Maud Gonne.
Some significant events in his relationships that could influence his work.
- Yeat’s kept Maud Gonne in mind when writing, ‘The Countless Kathleen’.
- His difficult rejections and relationship that he faced with Maud Gonne inspired him to write many pieces.

# data[].attributes.body
Work/Poetry
Did Yeats have any major recognitions for his poetry?
- Awarded Nobel Prize in 1923 in Literature for his inspired poetry.
How did his work evolve over time?
- Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize.
-  Yeat’s dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static and esoteric style in 1910.
What was his work influenced by?
Much of Yeats early poetry was influenced by religious symbols, Irish mythology and the romantics most notably Shelley. In his later years Yeats' poetry became more politicised. Throughout his writings he was heavily inspired by Irish folklore and used ornate language and symbolism.

# data[].attributes.headline
•	Where was he born?William Buter Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland.             •	What significant events did he live through?            Throughout his lifetime, he witnessed the troubles of land war as well as the rise and fall of the great Irish Parliamentarian.    

# data[].attributes.subject
•	Where was he born?William Buter Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland.             •	What significant events did he live through?            Throughout his lifetime, he witnessed the troubles of land war as well as the rise and fall of the great Irish Parliamentarian.    

# data[].attributes.body
Where was he born?
William Butler Yeats was born on the 13th of June 1865 in Sandymount Ireland.

What significant events did he live through?
Between 1884 and 1886 he attended Metropolitan School of art where his first known work was written.
In 1886 he held his first solo publication which was pamphlet Mosada.

# data[].attributes.body
What significant relationships did he have - e.g Friends, Wife, Children
Has 2 children Anne and Micheal and was married to Maud Gonne. Before marriage Yeat loved another person called Maud Gonne who rejected him.

Who were his love interests?
Some significant events in his relationships that could influence his work
When he got rejected by Maud Gonne and decided to marry someone else left Yeat in a world of misery and torment.

# data[].attributes.body
Did Yeats have any major recognitions for his poetry?
One of the greatest poets considered in the 20th century. In 1923 he won a Nobel prize.

How did his work evolve over time?
Yeat must’ve started writing his art pretty early since his first known art was when he was 17. However, his writing became more famous at his later time.

What was his work influenced by?
Yeat looked up to Willian Blake who strongly inspired and shape his poets. His first known work was heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was also influenced by Irish myth and folklore.

# data[].attributes.body
-      Where was he born?

He was born in Sandymount, Ireland.

-      What significant events did he live through?

His poetry was published for the first time in the Dublin University Review in 1885.

Met John O’Leary in 1885.

Moving to London at the end of 1886.

Award of the Nobel Prize in 1923.

# data[].attributes.body
-      What significant relationships did he have - e.g Friends, Wife, Children

Family: His family was a wealthy, creative and supportive family.

Wife (Georgie Hyde Lees): It was a successful marriage; however, not a passionate relationship.

Children: Had two children, Anne and Michael.

-      Who were his love interests?

Maud Gonne

-      Some significant events in his relationships that could influence his work

Love interest towards Maud Gonne, 3 times of proposal and rejections.

# data[].attributes.body
-      Did Yeats have any major recognitions for his poetry?

He maintained his cultural roots, featuring Irish legends and heroes in many of his poems and plays when he was 14.

-      How did his work evolve over time?

è  Heavily inspired by Irish folklore and symbolism as a young poet (long poems, epic in style, mystical, romantic)

è  After the midst of the independence movement, his style become more modernist and explicit

è  In the last decade or two he enjoyed a creative rejuvenation (mystical and symbolic style)

-      What was his work influenced by?

Met John O’Leary, a famous patriot and produced many poems based on Irish legends, folklore, ballads and songs instead of romantic settings and themes that he preferred.

# data[].attributes.body
- Where was he born?
William Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland.
- What significant events
did he live through?
Ireland was in the midst of the independence movement, the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent civil war.

# data[].attributes.body
- What significant relationships did he have - e.g Friends, Wife, Children
Yeats was rejected by his first love, Maud Gonne multiple times before marrying Georgie Hyde Lees. They (Georgie and Yeats) had two children; Michael and Anne
- Who were his love
interests?
Maud Gonne
- Some significant events
in his relationships that
could influence his work
being rejected from Maud Gonne multiple times

# data[].attributes.body
- Did Yeats have any major recognitions for his poetry?
known as one of the greatest poets of 20th century and awarded Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923
- How did his work evolve over time?
He wrote long poems that were mystical and romantic. As he matured, his interests turned to contemporary issues and social commentary. His style then became more modernist and explicit. Finally in the last decade or two of his life, he was enjoying a creative rejuvenation, his work being mystical again.

- What was his work influenced by?
Yeats was influenced by Irish folklore, ornate language and symbolism

# data[].attributes.body
- Where was he born?
He was born in 1865 in Sandymount, Ireland.

- What significant events did he live through?
He lived through the independence movement in Ireland which heavily influenced his poetry, as well as WW1.

# data[].attributes.body
- What significant relationships did he have?
He was married to Georgiana Hyde-Lees for 22 years, in which they had two children two children together, Michael and Anne Yeats.

- Who were his love interests?
Even though Yeats was married to Georgiana, his heart was always with Maud Goone,  an English actress. Yeats proposed to her but was rejected and instead he asked Goone's daughter, Iseult to marry him instead.

- Some significant events in his relationship that could influence his work
Maud Goone was a significant influence on his poetry.

# data[].attributes.body
- Did he have any major recognitions for his poetry?
'The Stolen Child', written in 1886 was his most famous poem, written he was only 21 years old.

- How did his work evolve over time?
His early work was considered to be both conventional and 'utterly unIrish', as he started his career as a romantic poet. However, he gradually evolved into a modernist poet.

- What was his work influenced by?
William Blake is credited with being one of his most significant influences. His poems were also based on Irish legends, folklore, ballads and songs.

# data[].attributes.body
-       Where was he born?

13 June 1865, Sandymount, Ireland.

-       What significant events did he live through?

Irish War of Independence

WW1 and WW2

# data[].attributes.body
-       What significant relationships did he have - e.g Friends, Wife, Children

Georgie Hyde-Lees was the wife of the poet William Butler Yeats. He was 27 years her senior, they were married for 22 years. They had two children together.

-       Who were his love interests?

Before marrying his wife, in 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne, an Irish beauty, ardent and brilliant. He fell in love with her, but his love was hopeless. Maud Gonne liked and admired him, but she was not in love with him.

-       Some significant events in his relationships that could influence his work

In 1889 Yeats met the woman who became the greatest single influence on his life and poetry, Maud Gonne but she rejected him multiple times leaving him heart broken.

# data[].attributes.body
-       Did Yeats have any major recognitions for his poetry?

In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

Remembered as one of the leading Western poets of the 20th century

-       How did his work evolve over time?

In his early years Yeats’s poetry was considered to be both conventional and 'utterly unIrish', as he started his career as a romantic poet. However, he gradually evolved into a modernist poet.

-       What was his work influenced by?

He met George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and other poets and artists who influenced him to write.

# data[].attributes.body
Where was he born?
He was born in 1865 in Sandymount, Ireland.

What significant
events did he live
through?
He lived through the Independence movement , 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent civil war.

# data[].attributes.body
What significant relationships did he have - e.g Friends, Wife, Children?
-Proposed to Maud Gonne but got rejected
-married Georgie Hyde Lees at the age of 51
- Had 2 children :Anne and Michael

Who were his love interests?
Maud gonne
Proposed multiple times and got turned down each time

Some significant events in his relationships that could influence his work
His many rejections from Maud gonne most likely influenced his poetry.

# data[].attributes.body
Did Yeats have any major recognitions for his poetry?
-Noble prise for literature (1923)
-One of the leading Western poets of the 20th century

How did his work evolve over time?
-His early poetry was considered to be both conventional and 'utterly unIrish', as he started his career as a romantic poet.
-He gradually evolved into a modernist poet.

What was his work influenced by?
-Willian Blake who strongly inspired and shaped his poems
-First known work was heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Also influenced by Irish myth, folklore, songs and ballads

# data[].attributes.body
Birth: 13 June 1865, Sandymount, Ireland
Death: 28 January 1939, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France
Significant Events:
World War 1 (1914-1918)
Spanish Flu Pandemic (1918-1920)
Irish War of Independence (1919-1921)

# data[].attributes.body
Relatives: John Butler Yeats (Father)
Family:

# data[].attributes.body
Recognition: 1923 - Received Nobel Prize for Literature
Work Evolution: His poetry was considered 'Utterly UnIrish" due to the romanticism of his work.

# data[].attributes.body
-       Where was he born?
Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865
-       What significant events did he live through?
Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period.

# data[].attributes.body
-       What significant relationships did he have - e.g Friends, Wife, Children?
Asked for Muad to marry him but got turned down each time. Then she marries the person he hates. Not gonna lie that's actually pretty funny. Then she had a son who died and became friends again with Yeats. Yay
When Yeats was 51 he finally gets married to a 25 year old Georgie Hyde Lees. He had two children with her (Anne and Michael).
-       Who were his love interests?
Maud Gonne was the women he desired but got rejected =(
Then he married Georgie Hyde Lees
-       Some significant events in his relationships that could influence his work
Maud Gonne would be the most influential person that would affect his work in poetry. Since all that rejection would create a driving gloomy mood and atmosphere which would drive the words he writes on his page..or scroll whatever they wrote on back then.

# data[].attributes.body
-       Did Yeats have any major recognitions for his poetry?
In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature
-       How did his work evolve over time?
His work turned back towards the mystical and symbolic style of his early poems. his work became much more spiritual, personal and internal. He reflected on the concept of his impending death as well as other things, and included some of the strongest imagery in 20th century poetry with his later work.
-      What was his work influenced by?
Although Yeats's early works drew heavily on Shelley, Edmund Spenser, and on the diction and colorings of pre-Raphaelite verse, he soon turned to Irish mythology and folklore and the writings of William Blake

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
read this poet's poems
Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Irish Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest poets-in any language-of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
read this poet's poems Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland since at least the end of the 17th century. Most members of this minority considered themselves English people who happened to have been born in Ireland, but Yeats staunchly affirmed his Irish nationality. Although he lived in London for 14 years of his childhood (and kept a permanent home there during the first half of his adult life), Yeats maintained his cultural roots, featuring Irish legends and heroes in many of his poems and plays. He was equally firm in adhering to his self-image as an artist. This conviction led many to accuse him of elitism, but it also unquestionably contributed to his greatness. As fellow poet W.H. Auden noted in a 1948 Kenyon Review essay entitled "Yeats as an Example," Yeats accepted the modern necessity of having to make a lonely and deliberate "choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which [made] sense of his experience." Auden assigned Yeats the high praise of having written "some of the most beautiful poetry" of modern times. Perhaps no other poet stood to represent a people and country as poignantly as Yeats, both during and after his life, and his poetry is widely read today across the English-speaking world.

In 1885, an important year in Yeats's early adult life, his poetry was published for the first time, in the Dublin University Review, and he began his important interest in occultism. It was also the year that he met John O'Leary, a famous patriot who had returned to Ireland after 20 years of imprisonment and exile for revolutionary nationalistic activities. O'Leary had a keen enthusiasm for Irish books, music, and ballads, and he encouraged young writers to adopt Irish subjects. Yeats, who had preferred more romantic settings and themes, soon took O'Leary's advice, producing many poems based on Irish legends, Irish folklore, and Irish ballads and songs. As he explained in a note included in the 1908 volume Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats: "When I first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance, but presently I convinced myself ... that I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end."

As Yeats began concentrating his poetry on Irish subjects, he was compelled to accompany his family in moving to London at the end of 1886. There he wrote poems, plays, novels, and short stories-all with Irish characters and scenes. In addition, he produced book reviews, usually on Irish topics. In London, Yeats met with Maud Gonne, a tall, beautiful, socially prominent young woman passionately devoted to Irish nationalism. Yeats soon fell in love with Gonne, and courted her for nearly three decades; although he eventually learned that she had already borne two children from a long affair, with Gonne's encouragement Yeats redoubled his dedication to Irish nationalism and produced such nationalistic plays as The Countess Kathleen (1892), which he dedicated to her, and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), which featured her as the personification of Ireland in the title role.

Gonne shared Yeats's interest in occultism and spiritualism. Yeats had been a theosophist, but in 1890 he turned from its sweeping mystical insights and joined the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practiced ritual magic. Yeats remained an active member of the Golden Dawn for 32 years, becoming involved in its direction at the turn of the century and achieving the coveted sixth grade of membership in 1914, the same year that his future wife, Georgiana Hyde-Lees, also joined the society.

Although Yeats's occult ambitions were a powerful force in his private thoughts, the Golden Dawn's emphasis on the supernatural clashed with his own need as a poet for interaction in the physical world, and thus in his public role he preferred to follow the example of John Keats, a Romantic poet who remained-in comparison with Romantics William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley-relatively close to the materials of life. Yeats avoided what he considered the obscurity of Blake, whose poetic images came from mystical visions rather than from the familiar physical world. Even so, Yeats's visionary and idealist interests were more closely aligned with those of Blake and Shelley than with those of Keats, and in the 1899 collection The Wind among the Reeds he employed occult symbolism in several poems.

Most of Yeats's poetry, however, used symbols from ordinary life and from familiar traditions, and much of his poetry in the 1890s continued to reflect his interest in Irish subjects. During this decade he also became increasingly interested in poetic techniques. He befriended English decadent poet Lionel Johnson, and in 1890 they helped found the Rhymers' Club, a group of London poets who met to read and discuss their poems. The Rhymers placed a very high value on subjectivity and craftsmanship and preferred sophisticated aestheticism to nationalism. The club's influence is reflected in the lush density of Yeats's poetry of the times, culminating in The Wind among the Reeds (1899). Although Yeats was soon to abandon that lush density, he remained permanently committed to the Rhymers' insistence that a poet should labor "at rhythm and cadence, at form and style"-as he reportedly told a Dublin audience in 1893.

The turn of the century marked Yeats's increased interest in theatre, an interest influenced by his father, a famed artist and orator who loved highly dramatic moments in literature. In the summer of 1897 the author enjoyed his first stay at Coole Park, the County Galway estate of Lady Augusta Gregory. There he devised, with Lady Gregory and her neighbor Edward Martyn, plans for promoting an innovative, native Irish drama. In 1899 they staged the first of three annual productions in Dublin, including Yeats's The Countess Kathleen, and in 1902 they supported a company of amateur Irish actors in staging both George Russell's Irish legend "Deirdre" and Yeats's Cathleen ni Houlihan. The success of these productions led to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society with Yeats as president. After a wealthy sponsor volunteered to pay for the renovation of Dublin's Abbey Theatre as the company's permanent home, the theatre opened on December 27, 1904. It included plays by the company's three directors: Lady Gregory, John M. Synge, and Yeats, who was represented that night with On Baile's Strand, the first of his several plays featuring heroic ancient Irish warrior Cuchulain.

During the first decade of the 20th century Yeats was extremely active in the management of the Abbey Theatre company. At this time he also wrote 10 plays, and the simple, direct style of dialogue required for the stage became an important consideration in his poems as well. He abandoned the heavily elaborated style of The Wind Among the Reeds in favor of conversational rhythms and simpler diction. This transformation in his poetic style can be traced in his first three collections of the 20th century: In the Seven Woods (1903), The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), and Responsibilities (1914). Several poems in those collections use style as their subject. For example, in "A Coat," written in 1912, Yeats derided his 1890s poetic style, saying that he had once adorned his poems with a coat "covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies." The poem concludes with a brash announcement: "There's more enterprise / In walking naked." This departure from a conventional 19th-century manner disappointed his contemporary readers, who preferred the pleasant musicality of such familiar poems as " The Lake Isle of Innisfree," which he wrote in 1890.

Simplification was only the first of several major stylistic changes. In "Yeats as an Example?" an essay in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978, the prominent Irish poet Seamus Heaney commended Yeats for continually altering and refining his poetic craftsmanship. "He is, indeed, the ideal example for a poet approaching middle age," Heaney declared. "He reminds you that revision and slog-work are what you may have to undergo if you seek the satisfaction of finish; he bothers you with the suggestion that if you have managed to do one kind of poem in your own way, you should cast off that way and face into another area of your experience until you have learned a new voice to say that area properly."

Eventually, Yeats began experimenting as a playwright; in 1916, for instance, he adopted a deliberately esoteric, nonrealistic dramatic style based on Japanese Noh plays, a theatrical form to which he had been introduced by poet Ezra Pound. These plays were described by Yeats as "plays for dancers."

While Yeats fulfilled his duties as president of the Abbey Theatre group for the first 15 years of the 20th century, his nationalistic fervor was less evident. Maud Gonne had moved to Paris with her husband, exiled Irish revolutionary John MacBride, and the author was left without her encouragement. But in 1916 he once again became a staunch exponent of the nationalist cause, inspired by the Easter Rising, an unsuccessful, six-day armed rebellion of Irish republicans against the British in Dublin. MacBride, who was now separated from Gonne, participated in the rebellion and was executed afterward. Yeats reacted by writing " Easter, 1916," an eloquent expression of his complex feelings of shock, romantic admiration, and a more realistic appraisal.

The Easter Rising contributed to Yeats's eventual decision to reside in Ireland rather than England, and his marriage to Hyde-Lees in 1917 further strengthened that resolve. Earlier, in an introductory verse to Responsibilities, he had asked his ancestors' pardon for not yet having married to continue his Irish lineage: "Although I have come close on forty-nine, / I have no child, I have nothing but a book." With marriage came another period of exploration into complex and esoteric subjects for Yeats. He had long been fascinated by the contrast between a person's internal and external selves-between the true person and those aspects that the person chooses to present as a representation of the self. Yeats had first mentioned the value of masks in 1910 in a simple poem, "The Mask," where a woman reminds her lover that his interest in her depends on her guise and not on her hidden, inner self. Yeats gave eloquent expression to this idea of the mask in a group of essays, Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918): "I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self." This notion can be found in a wide variety of Yeats's poems.

Yeats also continued to explore mysticism. Only four days after the wedding, his bride began what would be a lengthy experiment with the psychic phenomenon called automatic writing, in which her hand and pen presumably served as unconscious instruments for the spirit world to send information. Yeats and his wife held more than 400 sessions of automatic writing, producing nearly 4,000 pages that Yeats avidly and patiently studied and organized. From these sessions Yeats formulated theories about life and history. He believed that certain patterns existed, the most important being what he called gyres, interpenetrating cones representing mixtures of opposites of both a personal and historical nature. He contended that gyres were initiated by the divine impregnation of a mortal woman-first, the rape of Leda by Zeus; later, the immaculate conception of Mary. Yeats found that within each 2,000-year era, emblematic moments occurred at the midpoints of the 1000-year halves. At these moments of balance, he believed, a civilization could achieve special excellence, and Yeats cited as examples the splendor of Athens at 500 B.C., Byzantium at A.D. 500, and the Italian Renaissance at A.D. 1500.

Yeats further likened these historical cycles to the 28-day lunar cycle, contending that physical existence grows steadily until it reaches a maximum at the full moon, which Yeats described as perfect beauty. In the remaining half of the cycle, physical existence gradually falls away, until it disappears completely at the new moon, whereupon the cycle begins again. Applying this pattern both to historical eras and to individuals' lives, Yeats observed that a person completes the phases as he advances from birth to maturity and declines toward death. Yeats elaborated the scheme by assigning particular phases to specific types of personality, so that although each person passes through the many phases during a lifetime, one provides an overall characterization of the individual's entire life. Yeats published his intricate and not completely systematic theories of personality and history in A Vision (1925; substantially revised in 1937), and some of the symbolic patterns (gyres, moon phases) provide important background to many of the poems and plays he wrote during the second half of his career.

During these years of Yeats's esoterica Ireland was rife with internal strife. In 1921 bitter controversies erupted within the new Irish Free State over the partition of Northern Ireland and over the wording of a formal oath of allegiance to the British Crown. These issues led to an Irish civil war, which lasted from June 1922 to May 1923. Yeats emphatically sided with the new Irish government. He accepted a six-year appointment to the senate of the Irish Free State in December 1922, a time when rebels were kidnapping government figures and burning their homes. In Dublin, where Yeats had assumed permanent residence in 1922 (after maintaining a home for 30 years in London), the government even posted armed sentries at his door. As senator, Yeats considered himself a representative of order amid the chaotic new nation's slow progress toward stability. He was now the "sixty-year-old smiling public man" of his poem "Among School Children," which he wrote after touring an Irish elementary school. He was also a world-renowned artist of impressive stature, having received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Yeats's poems and plays produced during his senate term and beyond are, at once, local and general, personal and public, Irish and universal. At night the poet could "sweat with terror" (a phrase in his poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen") because of the surrounding violence, but he could also generalize those terrifying realities by linking them with events in the rest of the world and with all of history. The energy of the poems written in response to these disturbing times gave astonishing power to his collection The Tower (1928), which is often considered his best single book, though The Wild Swans at Coole (1917; enlarged edition, 1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower, The Winding Stair (1929); enlarged edition, 1933), and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932), also possess considerable merit.

Another important element of poems in both these collections and other volumes is Yeats's keen awareness of old age. Even his romantic poems from the late 1890s often mention gray hair and weariness, though those poems were written while he was still a young man. But when Yeats was nearly 60, his health began to fail and he was faced with real, rather than imaginary, "bodily decrepitude" (a phrase from "After Long Silence") and nearness to death. Despite the author's often keen awareness of his physical decline, the last 15 years of his life were marked by extraordinary vitality and an appetite for life. He continued to write plays, including Sophocles' King Oedipus and Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (translations performed with masks in 1926 and 1927) and The Words upon the Window Pane (1934), a full-length work about spiritualism and the 18th century Irish writer Jonathan Swift. In 1929, as an expression of gaiety after recovering from a serious illness, he also wrote a series of brash, vigorous poems narrated by a fictitious old peasant woman, Crazy Jane. His pose as " The Wild Old Wicked Man" (the title of one of his poems) and his poetical revitalization was reflected in the title of his 1938 volume New Poems.

As Yeats aged, he saw Ireland change in ways that angered him. The Anglo-Irish Protestant minority no longer controlled Irish society and culture, and with Lady Gregory's death in 1932 and the abandonment of the Coole Park estate, Yeats felt detached from the brilliant achievements of the 18th Anglo-Irish tradition. According to Yeats's unblushingly antidemocratic view, the greatness of Anglo-Irishmen such as Jonathan Swift, philosopher George Berkeley, and statesman Edmund Burke, contrasted sharply with the undistinguished commonness of contemporary Irish society, which seemed preoccupied with the interests of merchants and peasants. He laid out his unpopular opinions in late plays such as Purgatory (1938) and the essays of On the Boiler (1939).

But Yeats offset his frequently brazen manner with the personal conflicts expressed in his last poems. He faced death with a courage that was founded partly on his vague hope for reincarnation and partly on his admiration for the bold heroism that he perceived in Ireland in both ancient times and the 18th century. In proud moods he could speak in the stern voice of his famous epitaph, written within six months of his death, which concludes his poem "Under Ben Bulben": "Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!" But the bold sureness of those lines is complicated by the terror-stricken cry that "distracts my thought" at the end of another late poem, "The Man and the Echo," and also by the poignantly frivolous lust for life in the last lines of "Politics," the poem that he wanted to close Last Poems: "But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms."

Throughout his last years, Yeats's creative imagination remained very much his own, isolated to a remarkable degree from the successive fashions of modern poetry despite his extensive contacts with other poets. Literary modernism held no inherent attraction for him except perhaps in its general association with youthful vigor. He admired a wide range of traditional English poetry and drama, and he simply was unconcerned that, during the last two decades of his life, his preference for using rhyme and strict stanza forms would set him apart from the vogue of modern poetry. Yeats's allegiance to poetic tradition did not extend, however, to what he considered an often obscure, overly learned use of literary and cultural traditions by and Pound. Yeats deplored the tremendous enthusiasm among younger poets for Eliot's The Waste Land, published in 1922. Disdaining Eliot's flat rhythms and cold, dry mood, Yeats wanted all art to be full of energy. He felt that the literary traditions furnishing Eliot with so many allusions and quotations should only be included in a poem if those traditions had so excited the individual poet's imagination that they could become poetic ingredients of the sort Yeats described in "The Tower": "Poet's imaginings / And memories of love, / Memories of the words of women, / All those things whereof / Man makes a superhuman / Mirror-resembling dream."

Yeats wanted poetry to engage the full complexity of life, but only insofar as the individual poet's imagination had direct access to experience or thought and only insofar as those materials were transformed by the energy of artistic articulation. He was, from first to last, a poet who tried to transform the local concerns of his own life by embodying them in the resonantly universal language of his poems. His brilliant rhetorical accomplishments, strengthened by his considerable powers of rhythm and poetic phrase, have earned wide praise from readers and, especially, from fellow poets, including W.H. Auden (who praised Yeats as the savior of English lyric poetry), Stephen Spender, Theodore Roethke, and Philip Larkin. It is not likely that time will diminish his achievements.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland since at least the end of the 17th century.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Art

William Butler Yeats in an undated photo. Credit... Courtesy of The National Library of Ireland

DUBLIN

SO here, under airtight, light-shielding glass, is a notebook given to William Butler Yeats in 1908 by Maud Gonne, the beautiful, brainy feminist Irish revolutionary and object of Yeats's infatuation across five decades, the muse — well, really, the furnace — for his poetry of yearning and his willing partner in what they called a mystical marriage. As far as actual marriage, Gonne became expert at wielding the word "no."

Bound in white vellum, the notebook served as their metaphysical marital bed. Yeats used it to keep track of their shared fixation with the occult and each other. One morning in July 1908 Gonne wrote from Paris to report that she had been seized by a vision. "I had such a wonderful experience last night that I must know at once if it affected you & how?" she wrote. "At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & thought strongly of you & desired to go to you."

Yeats taped the letter into the notebook. Now, a century later, that book is on display at the National Library of Ireland, opened to a page that is just barely visible under the indirect lighting prescribed for aged ink treasures. Yet every syllable — every comma-deprived sentence, every curve in her script, every ampersand — is legible. Next to the display case the entire notebook has been digitally reincarnated. With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry. If needed, Gonne's handwriting can be deciphered on a pop-up screen that types out her fevered scrawl.

The notebook is one of thousands of elements in a dazzling exhibition, "The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats," more like a life-size, walk-through Web site than an ordinary museum show. With audiotapes, four short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The exhibition, which opened in 2006 and will run until January, then move to the United States if the library can find a suitable host, was mounted in part as a gesture of gratitude to the Yeats family. Soon after the poet's death in 1939, his widow, George, began giving his papers to the National Library. Those gifts continued from his daughter, Anne, an artist and stage designer who died in 2001, and from his son, Michael, an Irish senator who died in 2007.

The papers now occupy 38 yards of shelves; his personal library of 3,000 volumes has its own space. Catherine Fahy, one of the curators, said the family believed his papers belong to Ireland. "There was also the practical problem of scholars coming to George Yeats for access to them," she added. And thanks to various loans, paintings by Yeats (he was briefly an art student) and by his accomplished father, John Butler Yeats, and brother, Jack B. Yeats, are put to excellent use.

The exhibition draws its power not only from nimble navigational tools but also from the intimacy of the encounters. The four films are shown in cozy rooms that can seat only five or six at a time, in spaces decked out like his study, a backstage corner of the Abbey Theater and Thoor Ballylee, the chronically damp tower in County Galway where Yeats tried to set up home. The first stop is at a chapel-size octagon of screens. The bustle of the Dublin streets falls away, replaced by recordings of a dozen famous poems.

All his verse was meant to be heard, not read. Yeats once said, '"Write for the ear, I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when an actor or folk singer stands before an audience."

Here the words roll across one screen, while evocative pictures fill the others. The opening of each poem commands silence:

When you are old and gray and full of sleep

And nodding by the fire, take down this book.

The readers include Seamus Heaney, Sinead O'Connor and Theo Dorgan, but it is the voice of Yeats himself, reciting "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" at a sing-song pace, that comes as a revelation. Yeats "had a very distinctive Irish country accent, from Sligo," noted Patrick McAfee, a visitor earlier this month. "That was amazing. And the way he was reciting was very peculiar. My friend said it was rather beelike, like a bee in a glade."

In the four films Yeats (1865-1939) is presented as public man, poet, lover and occultist, a figure of towering achievement, eccentricities and pretensions. Less than 50 years after famine had decimated the island, and as tensions with England persisted, he championed a distinctly Irish cultural identity. He collected folklore, helped start the Abbey Theater and promoted John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey and others. On being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923, he said he regarded it as "part of Europe's welcome to the Free State."

As a member of the Irish Senate he spoke against a law underwritten by the Catholic hierarchy that banned divorce, and recalled that some of Ireland's greatest figures had been Protestant. His instinct, Seamus Heaney says in one film, was to find and stand by underdogs as power in society shifted. He also found his way into a eugenics society in 1936, and before then dabbled with the fascist Blueshirt movement. "A flirtation," Mr. Heaney says, "but not an affiliation."

At its core the exhibition offers Yeats's papers not as relics but as living documents.

The visitor sees a manuscript of "Sailing to Byzantium." Next to the display a digital tutorial shows how he kneaded the words and notions of the poem. Only in later drafts did he find a streak of lightning to open the poem:

"That is no country for old men."

Elsewhere software developed by the British Library allows visitors to page through digitized manuscripts. For Henry Kerr, a visitor who had chanced into the exhibition, the technology gave him handholds into Yeats's work. "It works very well, the touch screen and flipping through books, zooming in," Mr. Kerr said. "It opens it up a wee bit."

And there is eloquence too in the older media, in the static dignity of oil paintings, or even in an understated line or two on a display card. These elements are especially helpful in tracing the poet's elaborate romantic entanglements. "I don't know how he could have done all of it and wrote so much at the same time," said Sharon Callaghan, a visitor.

Video

How Yeats was inspired to write his poem. Video is from the exhibit at the National Library of Ireland. (Produced by Martello Media)

At their center was Maud Gonne, whom Yeats met in 1889, when, as he wrote, "the troubling of my life began." With her in mind for the lead role, he composed a play, "The Countess Kathleen." It took him 10 years. "The play was performed at the opening of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899," the exhibition notes. "Maud Gonne refused to take part in it."

Unknown to Yeats, Gonne had an affair with a French journalist and secretly gave birth to a boy, who died at the age of 2; she returned with her lover to the child's tomb to conceive again, believing that reincarnation would bring back the lost son.

The ordinary brushstrokes of life glow in their links to Yeats's art. She kissed him on the lips for the first time in 1899, then immediately confessed the truth about the affair and the children she had told the world were adopted. Their friendship survived her regular refusals to marry him, but he was devastated after she took another nationalist, Major John MacBride, for her husband. When that marriage went bad, Yeats comforted her. They apparently were physically intimate near the end of 1908, but she ended it a few months later.

Video

A documentary from the National Library of Ireland.

In 1916, at 51 and still a bachelor, he consulted an astrologist, then turned again to Gonne with an offer of marriage. She declined. With her permission he proposed to her 22-year-old daughter, Iseult, who had been conceived at her brother's grave. She too said no.

Besides being barking mad, everyone in this circle, it seems, could paint. "She is just fabulous looking," Ms. Callaghan said, gazing at a portrait of Iseult by Maud.

Yeats eventually married Georgina Hyde Lees (he called her George) in 1917, when she was 25 and he was 52. They had two children. At last, his Maud obsession seemed to ebb, nearly 30 years after they first met. His love life remained a tangle. Late in life he had a vasectomy, believed at the time to improve men's potency. He charged ahead with a dizzying series of affairs, and on his death in January 1939, both his wife and his last lover stood vigil at his bed.

Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote "A Bronze Head" about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a "dark tomb-haunter," so transformed from the light, gentle woman of his memory.

Almost from the beginning she had been a figure of memory. In the opening pages of the 1908 notebook he looked backward: "She said something that blotted away the recent past & brought all back to the spiritual marriage of 1898. She believed that this bond is to be recreated & to be the means of spiritual illumination between us. It is to be a bond of the spirit only."

Flipping ahead in the digital pages, one lands on Yeats's July 26 entry and learns that he too had relished the astral meeting that Gonne would chronicle so ecstatically. "Noticed also that for the first time for weeks," he wrote, "physical desire was awakened."

When her letter arrived, he would learn they were not quite synchronized. "Material union is but a pale shadow compared to it," she wrote. "Write to me quickly & tell me if you know anything of this."

Yeats knew it well.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Yeats Meets the Digital Age, Full of Passionate Intensity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Art DUBLIN SO here, under airtight, light-shielding glass, is a notebook given to William Butler Yeats in 1908 by Maud Gonne, the beautiful, brainy feminist Irish revolutionary and object of Yeats's infatuation across five decades, the muse - well, really, the furnace - for his poetry of yearning and his willing partner in what they called a mystical marriage.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1923 was awarded to William Butler Yeats “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It may be Bloomsday today and Ireland's most treasured writer James Joyce may be the name on everyone's lips, but last weekend another of our literary greats hit a milestone. If he were still alive today, William Butler Yeats would have reached the ripe old age of 150. Yeats was one of Ireland's finest poets and left a large canon of work behind when he passed away in 1939. Still studied in schools and universities all over the world today, he led an interesting life and his work is some of the most important in Irish literature. Here is everything you ever wanted to know about the life and work of WB Yeats...
The Yeats Family
WB Yeats came from a wealthy and highly creative family. His ancestor was Jervis Yeats, a well known Williamite soldier who made a living as a linen merchant, and was also a skilled painter. His grandson, Benjamin, married a woman named Mary Butler. Descended from the powerful Butlers of Ormond, when they married it was decided the couple and their subsequent family would keep both Bulter and Yeats as names. This marriage also consolidates the influence both families had in many areas, ensuring that they would be wealthy for many years to come.

William's father was John Butler Yeats (1839 - 1922), who started his adult life as a law student, but later abandoned his studies in favour of art. He married Susan Mary Pollexfen, a lady from a wealthy merchant family in Sligo. The couple had four children, all of whom ended up becoming prominent figures in the Irish arts scene; the couple's other son Jack is one of the most renowned Irish painters of the 20th century.Soon after William was born in 1865, the family relocated to his mother's family home in Merville, Sligo.

The beautiful rural surroundings and quiet life there came to be very special for him, and he thought of it as both his childhood and spiritual home. In fact, much of his work was inspired by the scenery in the local area. The family were members of the Protestant Ascendancy, which for his father's generation would have been very beneficial since they were the most privileged members of society. For William and his siblings however, it was somewhat more troublesome.

The nationalist movement in Ireland was gaining pace and with it came greater influence and support for Catholics, meaning that being a Protestant (and even worse, a rich one) meant you were automatically on the opposing side whether you liked it or not. This was another aspect of his family life that became a huge influence on Yeats' work. While the family was always supportive of the shift in power, there was naturally some resentment at play too.

In 1867 the family moved to London so John could pursue his studies in art. The children were home schooled for a time before the family settled. William was a largely mediocre student, with his best subject being latin. In 1880 they made the return to Dublin again. Yeats finished his school education and spent much of his spare time in his father's studio, where he first came into contact with the city's creative circles. It was around this time that he first started writing poetry, and by the age of 20 while a student at the Metropolitan School of Art (now the National College of Art and Design) his first poems were published in the Dublin University Review.

You may also be interested in checking out our blog post on 10 of The Best Irish Poets
Yeats and Maud Gonne
From when he was very young, Yeats had a great interest in mythology, mysticism and the occult. This is what influenced much of his early work (as well as the poets Shelley and Spencer). By 1889 at the age of 24 he had published his first poetry collection, entitled The Wanderings of Oisin. Based on the Fenian cycle of Irish mythology, it took him two years to complete and is the only long line poem he ever wrote.

In that same year he was to meet the woman who would become his muse and the love of his life; Maud Gonne. She was a passionate Nationalist with an outspoken personality, and he instantly fell in love with her. She had no romantic interest in him however, mostly because of his political and religious views which were so opposed to her own. She maintained a friendship with him nonetheless since she was a great admirer of his work, and they wrote to each other while Yeats lived in London (he and his family had returned there in 1887).

In 1891, he went to visit Maud in Ireland and proposed to her, but she turned him down. This, he later said, was where 'the troubling of my life again'. He remained undeterred and proposed a second time in 1899, a third time in 1900 and yet again in 1901. She rejected him each time.

To add further pain to these rejections, Maud eventually married Major John MacBride, a man Yeats completely detested, in 1903. He was another passionate nationalist and Maud converted to Catholicism in order to marry him. They had a son, Sean MacBride (who went on to become a politician and influential human rights activist) in 1904, but shortly after his birth the marriage came to an end. Yeats was obviously quite happy about this, especially when his friendship with Maud was renewed. They began to visit each other and finally in 1908 had a very brief relationship. After they had spent their first night together, Maud asked that they not continue the relationship anymore. Again, they continued to be friends and Yeats supported her as her life took a downward turn.

John MacBride was executed in the 1916 Rising and she was thought to have developed a chloroform addiction. In 1916 he proposed one last time, although this time it was mainly out of pity. He knew she would be an unsuitable wife, and he desperately wanted to marry and produce an heir. When Maud turned him down yet again, he instead proposed to her 25 year old daughter from her second marriage, Iseult! Once again, he was turned down.

At the age of 51, Yeats finally married. His wife was 25 year old Georgie Hyde Lees, and despite many critics the marriage was a success. They had two children (Anne and Michael), and while not exactly a passionate relationship - Yeats was known to have had affairs - it was at least a supportive one. The couple worked together on an occultist project, compiling a complex detailing of the messages communicated to them through seances which the poet published in 1925 under the title 'A Vision'.
Yeats' Later Life
In 1922 Yeats had firmly established himself as a literary great in Ireland, which was just coming out of a period of turmoil and conflict as a newly formed independent state. In what he thought of as a symbolic gesture, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the same year and was also elected to the Senate for the first of two terms. He was a regular commentator on the events taking place in the country and for the most part, his views were respected. He was re-elected in 1925, but was forced to give up his seat in 1928 due to his failing health.

In the years before his death he enjoyed a new lease of creative energy and became a prolific writer once again. He died in 1939 in Menton, France, and as per his wishes was buried with minimum fuss in the cemetery nearby. He requested that a year later 'when the newspapers have forgotten me', he would be reinterred in his beloved Sligo. Although the process took something longer than a year, he was eventually brought to his final resting place in Drumcliff, county Sligo, in 1948.

The person who took charge of the operation was, fittingly, Maud Gonne's son Sean MacBride. Some of Yeats' last works are his most beautiful, moving away from the political commentary he had become fixated on and taking on a more personal and reflective approach.
Poetic Style and Themes
Yeats was a traditionalist when it came to poetry. While his peers were experimenting with free verse, he was sticking to tried and tested conventions. Throughout his writings he was heavily inspired by Irish folklore and used ornate language and symbolism. There are three main stages of his work that run accordance with his youth, middle age and later years. As a young poet, his writings were elaborate and ornate, and what experts call 'pre-Raphaelite' in tone. He wrote long poems that were epic in style and filled with mystical, romantic imagery. As he matured, his interests turned to contemporary issues and social commentary. At this time Ireland was in the midst of the independence movement, the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent civil war.

His style became more modernist and explicit, but still with traditional form and rhythm characteristic of all of his work. Finally in the last decade or two of his life when he was enjoying a creative rejuvenation, his work turned back towards the mystical and symbolic style of his early poems. his work became much more spiritual, personal and internal. He reflected on the concept of his impending death as well as other things, and included some of the strongest imagery in 20th century poetry with his later work.

Two of Yeats' most enduring and most well known poems (and regularly recited by Irish students) are two from his early period; The Lake Isle of Innisfree and Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. Aptly, they each focus on the two things he cared about the most in his life; the beauty of county Sligo, and winning a soulmate:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day,

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Are you a fan of William Butler Yeat's work?

We'd love to hear from you!
Leave a comment below
You may also be interested in reading our blog post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It may be Bloomsday today and Ireland's most treasured writer James Joyce may be the name on everyone's lips, but last weekend another of our literary greats hit a milestone. If he were still alive today, William Butler Yeats would have reached the ripe old age of 150.