William Butler Yeats
- Born
- 1865-06-13 12:00:00
- Died
- 1939-01-28 12:00:00
- Gender
- Male
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of Ireland's foremost figures of 20th-century literature.
William Butler Yeats
Bertha Georgia Hyde Lees beside W. B. Yeats
Born in Sandymount in south Co. Dublin, the family relocated to his mother's home at Merville, Sligo to stay with extended family. Here the young poet came to think of Co. Sligo as his childhood and spiritual home. Its landscape became, over time, both literally and symbolically, his "country of the heart".
His father, John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. The Butler Yeats family were highly artistic; William's brother Jack B. Yeats became an esteemed painter, and his sisters Elizabeth Yeats and Susan Mary Yeats (aka Lollie and Lily Yeats) were part of the Arts and Crafts movement.
John Butler Yeats
Jack Butler Yeats
Elizabeth Corbet (Lolly) Yeats
Susan Mary (Lily) Yeats
The Yeats family are descended from well-known painter Jervis Yeats (d 1712), who was a Williamite soldier and linen merchant. In 1773, William's great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Yeats (Jervis's grandson) and married Mary Butler whose family had a landed estate in County Kildare. From this marriage, the family kept the name Butler.
Mary was descended from the Butler of Neigham (pronounced Nyam) Gowran family, who were descended from an illegitimate brother of the 8th Earl of Ormond.
WB Yeats' mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a wealthy merchant family in Sligo, who owned a milling and shipping business. John Yeats stated that "by marriage with a Pollexfen, we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs".
Susan Mary Pollexfen
In 1867, the family moved to England so that John, could further his career as an artist. WB Yeats spent his summers in the west of Ireland at the family house in Sligo.
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In 1880, for financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin, living at first just south of the Liffey at Harold's Cross and later at Howth in north Co. Dublin. During this period WB Yeats started writing poetry, and, in 1885, Yeats's first poems were published.
With his London and Dublin education, Yeats was very much part of London's fin de siècle and yet was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King’s Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907) are among the best known. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge.
Lady Gregory
Abbey Theatre
John Millington Synge
The nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage and informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. Napoleon's dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of WB Yeats" according to his biographer R. F. Foster [pub. 1997].
Napoleon Bonaparte
After 1910, Yeats’s dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English.
In 1922 Yeats was appointed to the Irish Senate and in December 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation".
On 28 January 1939, he died aged 73, at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France and was buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Yeats' express wish was that he be buried quickly in France with a minimum of fuss. "His actual words were 'If I die, bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year's time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo'."
In September 1948, Yeats's body was moved to the churchyard of St Columba's Church, Drumcliff, County Sligo. Yeats is commemorated in Sligo town by a statue by sculptor Ronan Gillespie. It was erected on the 50th anniversary of the poet's death in 1989, across the river from the Yeats Memorial Building (home to the Sligo Yeats Society).
William Butler Yeats Statue in Sligo
W. B. Yeats Statue in Dublin
St Columba's Church
Yeats Memorial Building
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