William Butler Yeats
(1865–1939)

William Butler Yeats's life can be seen as a quest. During his long career, Yeats immersed himself in his people's struggle for freedom, and he became an Irish national hero. On a personal level, Yeats constantly sought a system of belief that could replace the traditional Christian orthodoxy that he abandoned as a youth. In his poetry, Yeats was never satisfied with one style: like the modernist painter Pablo Picasso, Yeats was constantly evolving.

Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865. Both his father and his brother were painters, and young William attended art school for three years. At the age of 21, however, he abandoned painting for literature and nationalist politics.

In 1889, Yeats published his first collection of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin. The same year, he met and fell passionately in love with Maude Gonne, a beautiful young revolutionary whose refusal to marry Yeats deeply anguished the poet. In many of his works over the following decade, Yeats alludes to this unhappy relationship.

In 1896, Yeats met Lady Augusta Gregory, a wealthy and talented widow who became one of the major figures in the revival of Irish culture. Together with Lady Gregory, Yeats helped to found the Abbey Theater in Dublin, which opened in 1904. Yeats, who wrote dramas as well as poetry throughout his career, drew on native legends and folklore for many of his plays, including The Countess Cathleen (1892) and Deirdre (1907).

In the decade prior to World War I, Yeats published several collections of poetry that marked a shift in his style from Romanticism to a more colloquial idiom. Although he had become disillusioned with Irish nationalism, the Easter Rebellion of 1916 reignited Yeats's nationalist sympathies. In 1917, the poet's marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees, a devotee of spiritualism, initiated a new phase in Yeats's career. His interest in elaborating a personal system of symbols culminated in A Vision (1925), a major work in which Yeats detailed his complex, philosophical theories of history and human personality.

In the last phase of his career, Yeats produced much of his greatest poetry, including the collections entitled The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933). Towers, spirals, and whirling motion are important symbols in this body of work; Yeats used these symbols to suggest that the human journey through life involves both repetition and progression. Yeats died in southern France in 1939, less than a year before the outbreak of World War II. In 1948, his body was returned to Ireland and interred in County Sligo, a region where he had passed much of his childhood.

The Abbey Theater in Dublin opened in 1904 with three one-act plays, two of which were written by Yeats. The third play was the work of Yeats's close friend, Lady Augusta Gregory. As the permanent home of the Irish National Theater Society, the Abbey soon became a focus for nationalist sentiment. For nearly a century, the Abbey has been one of Dublin's best-known cultural landmarks.

The early history of the institution was marked by controversy: for example, the production of John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) caused a riot, and the authorities threatened to censor an early play by George Bernard Shaw. Yeats and Lady Gregory became leading shareholders of the Abbey in 1910, but Yeats soon gave up his active role in the theater's management.

During the 1920s, the Abbey was a showcase for the early dramas of Sean O'Casey (1880-1964), which dealt realistically with the themes of Irish patriotism and the life of the urban poor. In 1925, the Abbey received a grant from the Irish government, thus becoming the first state-subsidized theater in the English-speaking world. Beginning in the 1930s, the Abbey staged a number of plays in Gaelic. In 1951, the original building burned down; the new Abbey Theater opened in 1966.

A  |  B  |  C  |  D  |  E  |  F  |  G  |  H  |  I  |  J  |  K  |  L  |  M
N  |  O  |  P  |  Q  |  R  |  S  |  T  |  U  |  V  |  W  |  X  |  Y  |  Z