W. B. Yeats(1865–1939)

William Butler Yeats was born at 5 Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, on the thirteenth of June 1865, eldest son of the painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen of Sligo. The Pollexfens were a merchant-shipping family of Sligo on the Atlantic coast of the west of Ireland, and the boy was carried by his mother through every long summer of his childhood to the family house at Merville above Sligo town, the country that became, in his own description in 1909, the place that made him a poet. He was schooled at the Godolphin School in Hammersmith and at the High School in Harcourt Street, Dublin, and from 1884 to 1886 at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin where he came under the influence of the painter and mystic George Russell, the AE who would be a lifelong friend.

His first verse appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885, and through the 1880s and 1890s he built the slow apprenticeship of his early manner, the late-romantic, Pre-Raphaelite-saturated, ballad-form lyric of The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Wind among the Reeds (1899). The London literary world received him as the leading younger poet of the Celtic Revival; in Dublin he became, from his return there in 1896, the central organising figure of an entire cultural movement. He met Lady Augusta Gregory at her house at Coole Park in County Galway in 1896, and the two of them through the next decade founded the institutions of an Irish national literature in English: the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, the Irish National Theatre Society with the Fay brothers and J. M. Synge in 1903, and on the twenty-seventh of December 1904 the Abbey Theatre at Lower Abbey Street, Dublin, the first state-subsidised national theatre in the English-speaking world.

He wrote his own plays for the Abbey through the early 1900s, the verse-tragedies On Baile's Strand (1904), Deirdre (1907) and The Green Helmet (1910), the heroic-Cuchulainn cycle that runs through the body of his dramatic work. He defended at Abbey board level the controversial premieres of Synge's Playboy of the Western World in 1907 and Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars in 1926, and so anchored the Abbey as the institutional centre of Irish literature in English for the next half-century. He also, through the long parallel courtship of Maud Gonne from 1889 to her marriage to John MacBride in 1903 and after, wrote the central love-lyrics of his middle work, from The Lake Isle of Innisfree to The Wild Swans at Coole.

His later manner, from Responsibilities (1914) onward, dropped the Pre-Raphaelite vocabulary for the spare, bare-stress, hammered modernist verse on which his world reputation rests. The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921, with the Easter 1916 elegies), The Tower (1928, with Sailing to Byzantium and Leda and the Swan), The Winding Stair (1933, with Byzantium and A Dialogue of Self and Soul) and the Last Poems (1939, with Lapis Lazuli, The Circus Animals' Desertion and Under Ben Bulben) constitute the body of mature work by which T. S. Eliot, in his memorial address at the Abbey in 1940, judged him the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, the first Irish laureate, the Swedish Academy citing his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.

He served as a Senator of the new Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928, chaired the committee that designed the coinage of the state on the foundation of the Irish farm animals (the harp, the salmon, the wolfhound, the horse) still on the modern Irish coinage. He died at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d'Azur on the twenty-eighth of January 1939 in his seventy-fourth year. His body was returned to Ireland in September 1948 on the Irish naval corvette Macha and buried in the kirkyard of Drumcliffe under Ben Bulben in County Sligo, the place he had named in his last poem Under Ben Bulben for his own grave. The epitaph he wrote himself stands on the stone: Cast a cold eye on life, on death; horseman, pass by. Drumcliffe is among the most-visited literary graves in the world. The Yeats name in modern Irish letters carries the weight of the Sandymount-born poet who, in T. S. Eliot's words, was for half the century what he had been at its beginning, the indispensable English-language poet.