Yeats, W(illiam) B(utler)

Irish poet, dramatist, and scholar. He was a leader of the Irish literary revival and a founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His early work was romantic and lyrical, as in the poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and the plays The Countess Cathleen (1892) and The Land of Heart's Desire (1894). His later poetry, which includes The Wild Swans at Coole (1917) and The Winding Stair (1929), was much influenced by European and Eastern thought. Throughout his career Yeats's poetic style underwent an extraordinary process of reinvention and modernization, and shaped itself around an array of personal, mythological, and political concerns. His deep influence on both Irish literature and on poetry in English in general, and his stature as an imaginative artist, can hardly be exaggerated. He was a senator of the Irish Free State 1922–28, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Yeats was born into a Protestant family in Dublin and was educated in both London and Dublin. He spent much time in England, and died in the south of France, but his most productive years were spent living in County Sligo, Ireland. Following his artist father's footsteps, he first studied painting but soon turned to writing. In his early verse and poetic plays, such as The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), and Deirdre (1907), he drew heavily on Irish legend to create allusive, sensuous imagery. Later, his work adopted a more robust, astringent style and a tighter structure, and displayed a preoccupation with public affairs, all evident in the collection Responsibilities (1914).