William Butler Yeats (born June 13, 1865, Sandymount,Dublin, Ireland—died January 28, 1939, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France) was anIrish poet, dramatist, andprose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received theNobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Yeats’s father,John Butler Yeats, was a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant inSligo, in western Ireland. Through both parents Yeats (pronounced “Yates”) claimed kinship with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families who are mentioned in his work. Normally, Yeats would have been expected to identify with his Protestant tradition—which represented a powerful minority among Ireland’s predominantly Roman Catholic population—but he did not. Indeed, he was separated from both historical traditions available to him in Ireland—from the Roman Catholics, because he could not share their faith, and from the Protestants, because he felt repelled by their concern for material success. Yeats’s best hope, he felt, was tocultivate a tradition more profound than either the Catholic or the Protestant—the tradition of a hidden Ireland that existed largely in the anthropological evidence of its surviving customs, beliefs, and holy places, more pagan than Christian.

In 1867, when Yeats was only two, his family moved to London, but he spent much of his boyhood and school holidays inSligo with his grandparents. This country—its scenery, folklore, and supernatural legend—would colour Yeats’s work and form the setting of many of his poems. In 1880 his family moved back toDublin, where he attended thehigh school. In 1883 he attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where the most important part of his education was in meeting other poets and artists.

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Meanwhile, Yeats was beginning to write: his first publication, two brieflyrics, appeared in theDublin University Review in 1885. When the family moved back to London in 1887, Yeats took up the life of a professional writer. He joined theTheosophical Society, whosemysticism appealed to him because it was a form of imaginative life far removed from the workaday world. The age of science was repellent to Yeats; he was a visionary, and he insisted upon surrounding himself with poetic images. He began a study of the prophetic books ofWilliam Blake, and this enterprise brought him into contact with other visionary traditions, such as thePlatonic, the Neoplatonic, the Swedenborgian, and the alchemical.

Yeats was already a proud young man, and his pride required him to rely on his own taste and his sense of artistic style. He was not boastful, but spiritualarrogance came easily to him. His early poems, collected inThe Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems (1889), are the work of an aesthete, often beautiful but always rarefied, a soul’s cry for release from circumstance.

Yeats quickly became involved in the literary life of London. He became friends with William Morris andW.E. Henley, and he was a cofounder of the Rhymers’ Club, whose members included his friendsLionel Johnson andArthur Symons. In 1889 Yeats metMaud 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. Her passion was lavished upon Ireland; she was an Irish patriot, a rebel, and a rhetorician, commanding in voice and in person. When Yeats joined in the Irish nationalist cause, he did so partly fromconviction, but mostly for love of Maud. When Yeats’s playCathleen ni Houlihan was first performed in Dublin in 1902, she played the title role. It was during this period that Yeats came under the influence of John O’Leary, acharismatic leader of theFenians, asecret society of Irish nationalists.

After the rapid decline and death of the controversial Irish leaderCharles Stewart Parnell in 1891, Yeats felt that Irish political life lost its significance. The vacuum left by politics might be filled, he felt, byliterature,art,poetry,drama, andlegend.The Celtic Twilight (1893), a volume ofessays, was Yeats’s first effort toward this end, but progress was slow until 1898, when he metAugusta Lady Gregory, an aristocrat who was to become a playwright and his close friend. She was already collecting old stories, thelore of the west ofIreland. Yeats found that this lore chimed with his feeling for ancient ritual, for pagan beliefs never entirely destroyed byChristianity. He felt that if he could treat it in a strict and high style, he would create a genuine poetry while, in personal terms, moving toward his own identity. From 1898, Yeats spent his summers at Lady Gregory’s home,Coole Park, CountyGalway, and he eventually purchased a ruined Norman castle calledThoor Ballylee in the neighbourhood. Under the name of the Tower, this structure would become a dominant symbol in many of his latest and best poems.

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In 1899 Yeats asked Maud Gonne to marry him, but she declined. Four years later she married MajorJohn MacBride, an Irish soldier who shared her feeling for Ireland and her hatred of English oppression: he was one of the rebels later executed by the British government for their part in theEaster Rising of 1916. Meanwhile, Yeats devoted himself to literature anddrama, believing that poems and plays would engender a national unity capable of transfiguring the Irish nation. He (along with Lady Gregory and others) was one of the originators of the Irish Literary Theatre, which gave its first performance in Dublin in 1899 with Yeats’s playThe Countess Cathleen. To the end of his life Yeats remained a director of this theatre, which became theAbbey Theatre in 1904. In the crucial period from 1899 to 1907, he managed the theatre’s affairs, encouraged its playwrights (notably John Millington Synge), and contributed many of his own plays. Among the latter that became part of the Abbey Theatre’srepertoire areThe Land of Heart’s Desire (1894),Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902),The Hour Glass (1903),TheKing’s Threshold (1904),On Baile’s Strand (1905), andDeirdre (1907).

Yeats published several volumes of poetry during this period, notablyPoems (1895) andThe Wind Amongthe Reeds (1899), which are typical of his early verse in their dreamlike atmosphere and their use of Irish folklore andlegend. But in the collectionsIn the Seven Woods (1903) andThe Green Helmet (1910), Yeats slowly discarded thePre-Raphaelite colours and rhythms of his early verse and purged it of certain Celtic andesoteric influences. The years from 1909 to 1914 mark a decisive change in his poetry. The otherworldly, ecstatic atmosphere of the early lyrics has cleared, and the poems inResponsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914) show a tightening and hardening of his verse line, a more sparse and resonant imagery, and a new directness with which Yeats confronts reality and its imperfections.

In 1917 Yeats publishedThe Wild Swans at Coole. From then onward he reached and maintained the height of his achievement—a renewal of inspiration and a perfecting of technique that are almost without parallel in the history of English poetry.The Tower (1928), named after the castle he owned and had restored, is the work of a fully accomplished artist; in it, the experience of a lifetime is brought to perfection of form. Still, some of Yeats’s greatest verse was written subsequently, appearing inThe Winding Stair (1929). The poems in both of these works use, as their dominant subjects and symbols, the Easter Rising and the Irish civil war; Yeats’s own tower; theByzantine Empire and its mosaics;Plato,Plotinus, andPorphyry; and the author’s interest in contemporary psychical research. Yeats explained his own philosophy in the prose workA Vision (1925, revised version 1937); this meditation upon the relation between imagination, history, and the occult remains indispensable to serious students of Yeats despite its obscurities.

In 1913 Yeats spent some months at Stone Cottage,Sussex, with the American poetEzra Pound acting as his secretary. Pound was then editing translations of thenō plays ofJapan, and Yeats was greatly excited by them. The nō drama provided a framework ofdrama designed for a small audience of initiates, a stylized,intimate drama capable of fully using the resources offered bymasks,mime,dance, and song and conveying—in contrast to the public theatre—Yeats’s ownreconditesymbolism. Yeats devised what he considered an equivalent of the nō drama in such plays asFour Plays for Dancers (1921),At the Hawk’s Well (first performed 1916), and several others.

In 1917 Yeats asked Iseult Gonne,Maud Gonne’s daughter, to marry him. She refused. Some weeks later he proposed to Miss George Hyde-Lees and was accepted; they were married in 1917. A daughter, Anne Butler Yeats, was born in 1919, and a son, William Michael Yeats, in 1921.

In 1922, on the foundation of the Irish Free State, Yeats accepted an invitation to become a member of the new Irish Senate: he served for six years. In 1923 he was awarded theNobel Prize for Literature. Now a celebrated figure, he was indisputably one of the most significantmodern poets. In 1936 hisOxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935, a gathering of the poems he loved, was published. Still working on his last plays, he completedThe Herne’s Egg, his mostraucous work, in 1938. Yeats’s last two verse collections,New Poems andLast Poems and Two Plays, appeared in 1938 and 1939 respectively. In these books many of his previous themes are gathered up and rehandled, with an immense technical range; the aged poet was usingballad rhythms anddialogue structure with undiminished energy as he approached his 75th year.

Yeats died in January 1939 while abroad. Final arrangements for his burial inIreland could not be made, so he was buried at Roquebrune,France. The intention of having his body buried in Sligo was thwarted whenWorld War II began in the autumn of 1939. In 1948 his body was finally taken back to Sligo and buried in a little Protestant churchyard at Drumcliffe, as he specified in “Under Ben Bulben,” in hisLast Poems, under his own epitaph: “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!”

Had Yeatsceased to write at age 40, he would probably now be valued as a minor poet writing in a dyingPre-Raphaelite tradition that had drawn renewed beauty and poignancy for a time from theCeltic revival. There is no precedent in literary history for a poet who produces his greatest work between the ages of 50 and 75. Yeats’s work of this period takes its strength from his long and dedicated apprenticeship to poetry; from his experiments in a wide range of forms of poetry, drama, and prose; and from his spiritual growth and his gradual acquisition of personal wisdom, which he incorporated into the framework of his own mythology.

Yeats’s mythology, from which arises thedistilled symbolism of his great period, is not always easy to understand, nor did Yeats intend its full meaning to be immediately apparent to those unfamiliar with his thought and the tradition in which he worked. His own cyclic view of history suggested to him a recurrence and convergence of images, so that they become multiplied and enriched; and this progressive enrichment may be traced throughout his work. Among Yeats’s dominant images are Leda and the Swan;Helen and the burning ofTroy; the Tower in its many forms; the sun and moon; the burning house; cave, thorn tree, and well; eagle, heron, sea gull, and hawk; blind man, lame man, and beggar; unicorn and phoenix; and horse, hound, and boar. Yet these traditional images are continually validated by their alignment with Yeats’s own personal experience, and it is this that gives them their peculiarly vital quality. In Yeats’s verse they are often shaped into a strong and proudrhetoric and into the many poetic tones of which he was the master. All are informed by the two qualities which Yeats valued and which he retained into old age—passion and joy.