William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865.
By the age of 24 his poetry was well defined and his reputation
was growing. That year, 1899, Yeats fell in love with Maud Gonne.
This same year he published "The Wanderings of Oisin". He was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
Yeats was a founder of the Abbey Theater, Ireland's National Theatre. He was a revolutionary patriot, a celtic traditionalist and a senator in the Upper House of the Irish Dail.
He formed a profound attachment to County Sligo and wrote "The Lake Isle of Inishfree" that is so beloved of Irish school children. His poetry stands somewhere between the romanticism of Shelley and the realism of his successor, Heaney.
Regarded as the greatest poet of the twentieth century, Yeats, while a playwright, storyteller, and visionary, was first and always a poet.
Some works by Yeats:
- The Wild Swans At Coole
- Responsibilities
- The Wanderings of Oisin
- Baile and Aillinn
- In The Seven Woods
- Crossways
- The Wind Among The Reeds