W.B.

Yeats
W.B. YEATS WAS THE FIRST PERSON FROM IRELAND TO GET A NOBEL PRIZE

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist,
writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force
behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish literary establishment
who helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a
Senator of the Irish Free State.
He was a Symbolist poet, using allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his
career.Unlike the modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the
traditional forms.

Irish Literary Revival : The Irish Literary Revival (also called the Irish Literary
Renaissance, nicknamed the Celtic Twilight) was a flowering of Irish literary talent in the
late 19th and early 20th century.It includes works of poetry, music, art, and literature,
including perhaps most famously the work of Yeats.The literary movement was
associated with a revival of interest in Ireland's Gaelic heritage and the growth of
Irish nationalism from the middle of the 19th century.In 1903 Yeats, Lady Gregory,
George Russell, Edward Martyn, and Synge founded the Irish National Theatre
Society. The Irish Literary Theatre, established in 1898, also excelled in the production of
peasant plays. The greatest dramatist of the movement was John Millington Synge, who
wrote plays of great beauty and power in a stylized peasant dialect. Later, the theater
turned toward realism, mostly rural realism. Lennox Robinson and T.C. Murray were
among the early realists. In reaction to peasant realism, Sean O’Casey wrote three great
dramas of the Dublin slums: The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock
(1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926).

Abbey Theatre : also known as the National Theatre of Ireland , in Dublin, Ireland,(
Founded by Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and W. B. Yeats) is one of the country's
leading cultural institutions. First opening to the public on 27 December 1904, and
moved from its original building after a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present
day. The Abbey was the first state-subsidized theatre in the English-speaking world;
from 1925 onwards it received an annual subsidy from the Irish Free State. In its early
years, the theatre was closely associated with the writers of the Irish Literary Revival,
many of whom were involved in its founding and most of whom had plays staged there.
The Abbey served as a nursery for many of leading Irish playwrights, including William
Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán O'Casey and John Millington Synge, as well as
leading actors.
The Abbey's fortunes worsened in January 1907 when the opening of Synge's The
Playboy of the Western World resulted in civil disturbance. The troubles (since known
as the Playboy Riots) were encouraged, in part, by nationalists who believed the theatre
was insufficiently political.

YEATS AND ERNEST RHYS FOUNDED THE RHYMERS’ CLUB IN 1890. The
group, later known as the “Tragic generation”, included many prominent London-based
poets of the time who met to discuss and recite their poetry. Rhymers’ Club released two
anthologies of poetry in 1892 and 1894.

He studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the
occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work. His earliest volume of verse
was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund
Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.he
soon turned to Irish mythology and folklore and the writings of William Blake. In later
life, Yeats paid tribute to Blake by describing him as one of the "great artificers of God
who uttered great truths to a little clan".in 1891, Yeats published John Sherman and
"Dhoya", one a novella, the other a story.
From 1900 his poetry grew more physical, realistic and politicised. He moved away from
the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with some
elements including cyclical theories of life. He had become the chief playwright for the
Irish Literary Theatre in 1894, and early on promoted younger poets such as Ezra
Pound. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. His major later works
include 1928's The Tower and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, published
in 1932.

Yeats had a lifelong interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology. He

read extensively on the subjects throughout his life, became a member of the paranormal
research organisation "The Ghost Club".he wrote: "If I had not made magic my
constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would
The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist.

His first significant poem was "The Island of Statues", a fantasy work that took Edmund
Spenser and Shelley for its poetic models. His first solo publication was the pamphlet
Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), which comprised a print run of 100 copies paid for
by his father. This was followed by the collection The Wanderings of Oisin and Other
Poems (1889).

In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, a 23-year-old English heiress and ardent Irish
nationalist.
In 1891 he visited Gonne in Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He later
admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began". Yeats proposed to Gonne
three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. She refused each proposal, and in 1903, to his
dismay, married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride.

In the refrain of "Easter, 1916" ("All changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is
born"), Yeats faces his own failure to recognise the merits of the leaders of the Easter
Rising, due to his attitude towards their ordinary backgrounds and lives.

Easter Rising : also known as the Easter Rebellion, was an armed insurrection in
Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916. The Rising was launched by Irish republicans
against British rule in Ireland with the aim of establishing an independent Irish Republic
while the United Kingdom was fighting the First World War. It was the most significant
uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798 and the first armed conflict of the Irish
revolutionary period. Sixteen of the Rising's leaders were executed from May 1916. The
nature of the executions, and subsequent political developments, ultimately contributed to
an increase in popular support for Irish independence.

poem, "The Wild Swans at Coole"

By 1916, Yeats was 51 years old and determined to marry and produce an heir. His rival,
John MacBride, had been executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising, so Yeats
hoped that his widow, Maud Gonne, might remarry. Yeats proposed in an indifferent
manner, with conditions attached, and he both expected and hoped she would turn him
down. According to Foster, "when he duly asked Maud to marry him and was duly
refused, his thoughts shifted with surprising speed to her daughter." Iseult Gonne
was Maud's second child with Lucien Millevoye, and at the time was twenty-one years
old.when he finally resorted to proposing to her daughter, Iseult, the subject of his poem
“To A Child Dancing in the Wind .” Like her mother, Iseult also refused.
That September, Yeats proposed to 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees. Hyde-Lees
accepted, and the two were married on 20 October.

A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon
Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka, privately published in 1925, is a
book-length study of various philosophical, historical, astrological, and poetic topics
by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Yeats wrote this work while experimenting with
automatic writing with his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees. It serves as a meditation on the
relationships between imagination, history.

From 1935 to 1936 he travelled to the Western Mediterranean island of Majorca with
Indian-born Shri Purohit Swami and from there the two of them performed the majority
of the work in translating the principal Upanishads from Sanskrit into common
English; the resulting work, The Ten Principal Upanishads, was published in 1938.

His epitaph is taken from the last lines of "Under Ben Bulben",one of his final poems:

Cast a cold Eye

On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!

Yeats and his sisters Elizabeth and Susan founded the Dun Emer Press (later
changed to Cuala Press) in 1902 to publish work in support of the Celtic Revival.

The preface for the English translation of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali (Song
Offering)(for which Tagore won the Nobel prize in Literature) was written by Yeats
in 1913.
Modernists read the well-known poem "The Second Coming" as a dirge for the decline
of European civilisation, but it also expresses Yeats's apocalyptic mystical theories and is
shaped by the 1890s. His most important collections of poetry started with The Green
Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914). In imagery, Yeats's poetry became sparer
and more powerful as he grew older. The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair (1933), and
New Poems (1938) contained some of the most potent images in twentieth-century
poetry.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is a twelve-line poem comprising three quatrains, written by
William Butler Yeats in 1888 and first published in the National Observer in 1890. It was
reprinted in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics in 1892. It
exemplifies the style of the Celtic Revival: it is an attempt to create a form of poetry that
was Irish in origin rather than one that adhered to the standards set by English poets and
critics.

The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics : The Countess Kathleen and
Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) is the second poetry collection of W. B. Yeats.

It includes the play The Countess Kathleen and group of shorter lyrics that Yeats would
later collect under the title of The Rose in his Collected Poems.
The Countess Cathleen is a verse drama by William Butler Yeats in blank verse
(with some lyrics). It was dedicated to Maud Gonne, the object of his affections for
many years.

This volume includes several of Yeats' most popular poems, including "The Lake Isle of
Innisfree", "A Faery Song", "When You are Old", and "Who Goes with Fergus".

Other works :
1893 – The Celtic Twilight
1893 – The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic and Critical, co-written with
Edwin Ellis
1894 – The Land of Heart's Desire, published in April, his first acted play,
performed 29 March
1920 – "The Second Coming" - The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W.
B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920, and afterwards included in
his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer.The poem uses
Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe
the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a major work of modernist poetry
and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern
Poetry.

The Resurrection is a short prose play by William Butler Yeats.

1928 – The Tower, includes "Sailing to Byzantium"

As he became an old man, Yeats wrote two poems about the antique city of Byzantium.
These poems are very mystique. They tell from life and death and from the idea of being
born again.

Sailing to Byzantium" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928
collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight
lines of iambic pentameter. It uses a journey to Byzantium (Constantinople) as a
metaphor for a spiritual journey.
Opening line : That is no country for old men.

Byzantium" is Irish poet W.B. Yeats's meditation on the relationship between

mortality and immortality, the physical world and the spiritual world, and
humanity and art.

Leda and the Swan, sonnet by William Butler Yeats, composed in 1923, printed in
The Dial (June 1924), and published in the collection The Cat and the Moon and
Certain Poems (1924). The poem is based on the Greek mythological story of
beautiful Leda, who gave birth to Helen and Clytemnestra after she was raped by
Zeus in the form of a swan.
Famous plays written by Yeats include The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), Cathleen ni
Houlihan (1902), The Countess Cathleen (1911) and The Resurrection (1927).