Yeats, W(illiam) B(utler) 1865-1939
Irish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature

W B Yeats was born in Sandymount, a Dublin suburb. His father was the artist John Butler Yeats (1839-1922). His mother came from Sligo, a wild and naturally beautiful county where Yeats spent much time as a child. When he was two the family moved to London, where he later attended the Godolphin School, Hammersmith (1871-81). In 1881 the family returned to Ireland and lived in Howth, near Dublin where Yeats attended the High School.

In 1884 he enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, and his first lyrics were published in The Dublin University Review (1885). He was preoccupied with mysticism and the occult, and helped to found the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1885. He also pursued his interest in Irish mythology, the source from which so much of his poetry springs. In 1886 his first volume of verse, Mosada: A Dramatic Poem, was published.

He returned to London the following year with his family and contributed to anthologies of Irish poets and edited Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). He began to have poems accepted by English magazines, two American newspapers appointed him literary correspondent, and his circle of friends widened to include William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and others.

In 1889 he met and fell in love with the ardent Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, an event which he described as 'the troubling of my life'. Despite repeated offers from him (until 1903), she refused to marry him. Also in 1889 he published The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, which was well reviewed and established him as a literary figure. However, he became increasingly homesick and returned to Ireland in 1891.

A year later he published John Sherman and Dhoya (1892), two stories on Celtic themes suggested by his father, and the play The Countess Kathleen (1892), a Celtic drama rich in imagery and inspired by Maud Gonne. He also became a founder-member of the Irish Literary Society. In 1893 he published The Celtic Twilight, a collection of stories and legends, whose title haunted him until his death and stalks his reputation with its connotation of romantic vagueness.

His drama The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), which tells of a young woman spirited away by a fairy child, began regular production in London in 1894. Meanwhile, Yeats met Olivia Shakespear, with whom he had an affair, and worked on his collected Poems (1895), which elevated him to the ranks of the major poets.

In 1896 he met Lady Gregory, the mistress of an estate at Coole in Galway, where he set and composed many of his finest poems. With her encouragement, he helped to found the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, promoting playwrights such as J M Synge and contributing his own plays for performance (eg his most successful play, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), a propaganda play with Maud Gonne in the title role, which it is thought may have sparked the Easter Rising of 1916). This theatre became the Irish National Theatre, which opened the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904, and Yeats remained actively involved in its promotion for the next decade.

In 1903, after learning that Maud Gonne had married John MacBride, Yeats went to America. (MacBride was executed in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising, and Yeats remembered him and others in his famous poem, 'Easter 1916'.)

The Collected Works in Prose and Verse in eight volumes were published in 1906, and he worked on The Player Queen for the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 1919. His last attempt to write poetic drama using legends as a source appeared in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) and in 1914 he published Responsibilities, which marked a tightening and simplifying of his poetic style.

In 1917 he married Georgie Hyde-Lees. Together they shared an interest in psychical research which, along with Georgie's 'automatic writing', influenced later work, including The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and the prose A Vision (1925). Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) pre-empted the outbreak of the civil war and it was seven years before he published his next collection of poems.

During the intervening years he was engaged in playwriting, politics (he became a member of the Irish senate in 1922, on the foundation of the Irish Free State), and in 1923 was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

In 1928 he moved to Rapallo in Italy and in that year published The Tower, a dark vision of the future exquisitely expressed which, with the powerful collection The Winding Stair (1933), is generally regarded as his best poetic work. His controversially idiosyncratic anthology, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935, appeared in 1936.

Yeats was very much a grand literary and public figure, although his reputation was slightly tainted by his flirtation with fascism. He moved to Cap Martin, Alpes Maritimes, in 1938, where he died. His body was returned to Ireland in 1948 and buried in County Sligo. A titan of 20th-century literature, he wrote various volumes of autobiography which are collected in Autobiographies (1955).

Bibliography: R F Foster, W B Yeats: A Life - The Apprentice Mage (vol1, 1997); J Kelly The Collected Letters of W B Yeats (vol 1, 1865-95, 1986; vol 2, 1896-1900, 1997; vol 3, 1901-04, 1994); A N Jeffares, W B Yeats: A New Biography (1988); Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (1953, 2nd edn 1964) and The Man and the Masks (1949, reissued 1987); J B Hone, W B Yeats 1865-1939 (rev edn, 1952).