W.B Yeats
(1865-1939)
Biography:
Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son
of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in
County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to
Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but
quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish
landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a
movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during
the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native
heritage. Though Yeats never learned Irish Gaelic himself, his writing at the
turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and
folklore.
Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud
Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate
nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903
and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to
another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his
poetry.
131