In 1879 the family moved to Bedford Park taking a two-year lease on 8 Woodstock Road. Though he had difficulty with mathematics and languages (possibly because he was tone deaf ), he was fascinated by biology and zoology. Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject. He did not distinguish himself academically, and an early school report describes his performance as "only fair. On 26 January 1877, the young poet entered the Godolphin School, which he attended for four years. John provided an erratic education in geography and chemistry and took William on natural history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside. Their mother entertained them with stories and Irish folktales. At first, the Yeats children were educated at home. In 1867, the family moved to England to aid their father, John, to further his career as an artist.
These developments had a profound effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his country's biography. The 1880s saw the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement the 1890s saw the momentum of nationalism, while the Irish Catholics became prominent around the turn of the century. Foster observed that 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 W.B.Y." Yeats's childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power-shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy. While his family was broadly supportive of the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage and informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. Yeats was raised a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, which was at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. The Butler Yeats family were highly artistic his brother Jack became an esteemed painter, while his sisters Elizabeth and Susan Mary-known to family and friends as Lollie and Lily-became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement. So too did its location by the sea John Yeats stated that "by marriage with a Pollexfen, we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs". Its landscape became, over time, both personally and symbolically, his "country of the heart". Soon after William's birth, the family relocated to the Pollexfen home at Merville, Sligo, to stay with her extended family, and the young poet came to think of the area as his childhood and spiritual home. William's mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from Sligo, from a wealthy merchant family, which owned a milling and shipping business. Īt the time of his marriage, William's father, John Yeats, was studying law, but would later pursue art studies at Heatherley School of Fine Art, in London. Mary was of the Butler of Neigham (pronounced Nyam) Gowran family, descended from an illegitimate brother of The 8th Earl of Ormond. Following their marriage, they kept the name Butler. Benjamin Yeats, Jervis's grandson and William's great-great-grandfather, had in 1773 married Mary Butler of a landed family in County Kildare. His father, John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier, linen merchant, and well-known painter, who died in 1712.
William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland.
His major later works include 1928's The Tower and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, published in 1932. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. He had become the chief playwright for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1894, and early on promoted younger poets such as Ezra Pound. He moved away from the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with some elements including cyclical theories of life. 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.įrom 1900 his poetry grew more physical, realistic and politicised. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, lasting roughly from his student days at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin until the turn of the 20th century. He studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult.
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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.Ī Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent, Yeats was born in Sandymount and was educated in Dublin and London and spent childhood holidays in County Sligo. 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.
Yeats photographed in 1903 by Alice Boughton
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