Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite
Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the
political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the
increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in Londo, T.S
Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound,
becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but Yeats never
abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms.
He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting
to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic
philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older.
Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an
important cultural leader, as a major playwright (he was one of the founders
of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest
poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel
Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
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