2. EARLY YEARS
William Butler Yeats was born in sandymount,dublin on
the 13 June 1865 and died on the 28th of January 1939.
He was an irish poet and one of the foremost figures
of 20th century literature. His father was a barrister,and a
well known painter who died in. 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. His father wished him to
go to Trinity College, following the family tradition, but he
refused: he feared that would not meet the entrance
requirements. Instead he studied at the Metropolitan
School of Art in 1884–5, and then in 1886 at the Royal
Hibernian Academy.
3. HIS FIRST PUBLISH
Yeats published his first lyrics in the Dublin
University Review in 1885. He worked for some
time as literary correspondent for American
newspapers, including the Boston Pilot.
He met most of the poets of his generation at the
Rhymers’ Club, which he helped found. In 1891 he
helped establish the Irish Literary Society of
London.
4. HIS PUBLISHES
In 1889 he published The Wanderings of Oisin a
long, highly imaginative poem based on Irish
mythology, and in 1892 The Countess Cathleen, his
first poetic play.
His volume of folk stories, The Celtic Twilight,
appeared in 1893. In 1895 he edited A Book of Irish
Verse and published Poems. Three collections of
poems appeared in 1897: The Secret Rose, The
Tables of the Law, and The Adoration of the Magi.
5. MAUD GONNE
Yeats first met the love of his life, Maud Gonne, in 1889.
For him she symbolised the spirit of tragic beauty and
Irish nationalism. He proposed marriage to her in 1891
but was rejected. He was impressed by her
revolutionary activities and she was the subject of many
of his love poems. His long-sustained passion for her
was to have enormous consequences for his politics
and his poetry.
He became active in advanced nationalist politics after
the Parnellite split (1890) and tried to mobilise
nationalist literary groups as a basis for an Irish artistic
revival. He joined the IRB and played a prominent part
in the celebrations of the centenary of the 1798 Rising.
6.
In 1896 he met Lady Augusta Gregory, a talented and
capable woman whose house at Coole Park, Co
Galway, offered a warm welcome to writers and artists.
She encouraged him and helped him establish the Irish
Literary Theatre.
George Moore and Edward Martyn (who had introduced
Yeats to Lady Gregory) joined with Yeats as the
directors of the Irish Literary Theatre Society. It had its
first performance, Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, in
1899 and there was a great lot of controversy over it. In
1902 Maud Gonne played the title role in Yeats’s
Cathleen Ni Houlihan. He was still deeply in love with
her, but she rejected him again and to his horror married
Major John McBride in 1903.
7. MARRIED LIFE
In 1917 Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees (she was
26 and he was 52). Marriage changed his life and
Georgie influenced his poetry. In A Vision (1925), a
piece full of symbolism, he set out his ideas on
mankind and art, and this was the framework of
later poems. Two children were born, Anne in 1919,
and Michael in 1921. He bought Thoor Ballylee, a
small derelict tower-house in Co. Galway, close to
Lady Gregory’s home, and 82 Merrion Square, a
fine Georgian house in Dublin in 1922.
8.
9. A COAT -POEM
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
William Butler Yeats
