William Butler Yeats’s Life and Achievements

How can one’s life’s work turn into poetry? One can assume that poetry is only cause from despair. William Butler Yeats’s poetry says otherwise. Yeats uses the strength from his long and dedicated background into poetry. From the time spent as a young boy, seeing different religious views from his family motivated him to excel as a poet entering manhood. Being acknowledged as one of the best English-language poets of the 20th century, William Butler Yeats’s plays, notable poetry, and changes in art made him successful.

William Butler Yeats was born June 13, 1865 in Samdymount, Dublin in Ireland. Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, was a barrister who in time became a portrait painter. Yeats’s mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Sligo. Though his parents were both Protestant, William believed in a tradition more deeply than Protestant and Catholic. He was repulsed by Protestants for their distress for material success and he could not share their faith with the Catholics. He believed his best choice was to develop a tradition more insightful than Protestantism: the tradition of a veiled Ireland that was more pagan than Christianity by its customs and beliefs (“William Butler Yeats”).

In 1867, Yeats’s family moved to London where he spent much of his childhood with his grandparents in Sligo. This country inspired many of Yeats’s poems and forms their setting. In 1880, Yeats and his family moved back to their hometown where he attended high school. In 1883, he attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where he met other poets and artists. In the meantime, Yeats had begun to write by starting off with his first publication of two brief lyrics that appeared in the Dublin University Review in...

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... carefree about love. His beloved comforts him with her snow white hand indicating that she is young and carefree. She leaves him telling him to take life easy. As she leaves, he is full tears beginning to feel that he will never love again.

References

Bloom. Harold. William Butler Yeats. New York: Chelsea House of Publishers, 1970.

Donogue, Denis. William Butler Yeats. New York: The Viking Press, 1971.

Frenz, Horst. William Butler Yeats-Biographical. Amsterdam: Elsvier Publishing, 1969.

< http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/lauredates/1923/yeats- bio.html >

Maddox, Brenda. Yeat’s Ghosts. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1999.

“William Butler Yeats.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica. 8 Apr

< http://www. britannica.com/ EB checked/topic/652421/ William-Butler- Yeats>