They had two children, Anne and Michael Yeats. 

Son of well-known painter, John Butler Yeats. 

He worked with Lady Gregory, who was a dramatist, folklorist and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. The two collaborated for the 1902 production of the Cathleen Ni Houlihan. 

Married with Georgina Hyde Lees in 1917 when she was 25 and he was 52. 

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.

 

Inspired by William Blake- The renowned English poet and artist died almost three decades before Yeats was born but he is credited with being one of his most significant influences.

 

 

 William Butler Yeats was the preeminent writer of the Irish literary renaissance at the turn of the 20th century. His was also an important figure in European literary Modernism in the 1920s and '30s.

 O’Leary’s influenced him -“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.” 

Yeats's poetry continued to evolve as he aged. His last years saw the publication of many of his strongest works, including “Among School Children” in 1928 and “The Circus Animal's Desertion” in 1939.

-          He became friends with William Morris and W.E. Henley. He was a cofounder of the Rhymers’ Club, whose members included his friends Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons.

-          In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne, an Irish beauty, ardent and brilliant. From that moment, as he wrote, “the troubling of my life began.” 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. In 1899 Yeats asked Maud Gonne to marry him, but she declined.

-          In 1898, when he met Augusta Lady Gregory, an aristocrat who was to become a playwright and his close friend.

-          In 1917 Yeats asked Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne’s daughter, to marry him. She refused.

-          He proposed to Miss George Hyde-Lees and was accepted; they were married in 1917.

-          He had 2 children, a daughter, Anne Butler Yeats, was born in 1919, and a son, William Michael Yeats, in 1921.

 

Context: Key Events

-          He lived through World War 1

-          He lived through and Irish Civil War

-          He was present in France at the start of the Second World War

What did he live through:

-          World War 1 

-          Irish Civil War 

-          Irish Catholic Immigration to America 

-          Fenian Uprising 

-          Hanging Deaths of Irish immigrants