William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), poet, playwright, prose writer, and political figure, was born in Dublin, Ireland. He grew up listening to his mother’s stories about her home county of Sligo, Ireland, in addition to poems that his father, an artist and orator, read to him. Later on, much of Yeats’s work was inspired by his home country of Ireland. Throughout his childhood, Yeats lived in Sligo, Dublin, and London with his three sisters and two brothers. He attended Godolphin School in Hammersmith, London, the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin, and the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. In the 1890s, Yeats befriended Lady Augusta Gregory, and he wrote many of his poems and plays while visiting her house and garden in Coole Park. With Lady Gregory & others, Yeats founded an Irish national theatre called Abbey Theatre. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was appointed senator of the Irish Free State in 1922. His work was largely inspired by Irish mythology and folklore, as well as politics, love, magic, mysticism, and spiritualism. He married Georgiana Hyde-Lees in October of 1917, and they had two children (Anne and Michael). Both Yeats and Hyde-Lees became members of the magical order of The Golden Dawn in London. a secret society devoted to the study and practice of the occult, metaphysics, and paranormal activities. Yeats died on January 28, 1939, and he is buried in Drumcliffe churchyard, County Sligo. Yeats was living in France when he died; he told his friends to bury him there and then a year later, when the newspapers had forgotten him, to ‘dig me up and plant me in Sligo’.
“When I first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance, but presently I convinced myself ... that I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end.” -W.B. Yeats on his creative inspiration “A white blackbird among the others, a genius among the commonplace” -Katharine Tynan on W.B. Yeats Pieces of Yeats’s poetry: To a Child Dancing in the Wind Dance there upon the shore; What need have you to care For wind or water’s roar? And tumble out your hair That the salt drops have wet; Being young you have not known The fool’s triumph, nor yet Love lost as soon as won, Nor the best labourer dead And all the sheaves to bind. What need have you to dread The monstrous crying of the wind? Where My Books Go All the words that I gather, And all the words that I write, Must spread out their wings untiring, And never rest in their flight, Till they come where your sad, sad heart is, And sing to you in the night, Beyond where the waters are moving, Storm darkened or starry bright. Excerpt from The Stolen Child Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats, Full of berries And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Sources: Poetry Foundation. 2020. William Butler Yeats | Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-butler-yeats. Historytoday.com. 2020. Death Of W.B. Yeats | History Today, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/death-wb-yeats#:~:text=The%20poet's%20health%20was%20in,hasty%20private%20ceremony%20at%20Roquebrune. Doody, N., MacDonald, S. and Yeats, W., 2020. The Moon Spun Round. The O'Brien Press.
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