Jack Yeats's "Men of Destiny"   

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865.  His mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a wealthy Sligo family.  His father, John Butler Yeats, was an artist and amateur tyrant who greatly influenced his son, teaching W.B. to read and forming his early artistic tastes.  William was the eldest of four children.  His brother, Jack, became a famous painter, and his two sisters, Elizabeth Corbet and Lily, ran the Dun Emer (later Cuala) Press.  He grew up in London and Dublin, but the stories he learned while staying with relatives in Sligo County, Ireland, would influence his early poetry more than either of these places. 

William Butler Yeats

In his youth, Yeats attended Godolphin Day School in London, where he was a miserable student.  When the family returned to     Ireland (1880), he went to Erasmus High School, then the Metropolitan Art School.  The art school stint didn't last long; he didn't have the artistic skills of his brother and father, so he turned to poetry.    In 1886, Yeats published his first volume of poetry, Mosada, a Dramatic Poem (with which nobody is familiar).  A few years later, in 1889, he published The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, to great acclaim.  After reading The Wanderings of Oisin, Maude Gonne (actress, nationalist, and favorite model of Irish Pre-Raphaelite artists) requested an introduction to Yeats.  He fell in love with her, and the two remained friends for years, though she repeatedly refused his offers of marriage.  Many of the poems of his middle phase, including "Among School Children," "No Second Troy," and "Prayer for My Daughter" express the admiration and bitterness he felt towards her.  In the late 1880s, the poet also attended meetings of the Socialist League at William Morris's house, due more to his hero worship of Morris than to any political feelings.

The Yeats family returned to London during the tumultuous 1890s.  Here, William Butler Yeats helped to found the Rhymers Club, an association of poets that included such figures as Ernest Rhys, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde.  The group took Oxford professor Walter Pater as their role model.  In a more public arena, Yeats also spearheaded societies for Irish literature in both England and Ireland--The Irish Literary Society in London and The National Literary Society in Dublin.  

Upon Yeats's return to Ireland in 1896, he met Lady Augusta Gregory, who would become his patroness and partner in the Irish theater scene.  Together they formed the Irish Literary Theater as an attempt to transmit and keep alive Irish culture (Yeats's Nobel address, some years later, focused on the importance of drama to national identity).  This venue, later called the Abbey Theater, showcased Yeats's plays, most famously the Countess Cathleen plays and the Cuchulain cycle. 

In the 19-teens, Yeats hired Ezra Pound (founding father of Imagist poetry) as his secretary.  Already fascinated by theater, under Pound's influence, he became interested in the mystical potential of Japanese Noh drama.  
Although William Butler Yeats established his reputation as a poet at a young age, his domestic life took a slower pace.  At the age of 52, he married Georgie Hyde Lee, who had just turned 25.  Her seeming ability to channel spirits through automatic writing excited him, and provided the material for A Vision (1925).  His poetry, in fact, exhibits an increasing fascination with the occult.  The couple lived in Thoor Ballyle, a stone tower featured heavily in Yeats's later poetry.  They would have two children, Anne and William Michael.  

In 1922 the Irish Civil War began.  Yeats remained neutral, officially supporting the government, but many of his more radical Irish Nationalist friends (most notably Maude Gonne) suffered, even died, in the conflict.  "Easter 1916" and "In Memory of Con Markiewicz and Eva Gore-Booth" explore Yeats's mixed feelings about the war. 

The Pre-Raphaelites were not the only ones to influence Yeats's art.  His poems and plays draw from such sources as classical mythology, Irish myths and legends, the occult (specifically, a version of pseudo-scientific mysticism that gained great popularity in the 1890s), Walter Pater and his fellow members of the Rhymers Club, and the Irish Nationalistic movement, to name only a few.

In his later years, William Butler Yeats became, at least in the eyes of the public, the visionary poet and leader of society that Tennyson had been for the previous generation.  He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1923.  His acceptance speech focused on drama as a tool by which to reinforce national identity (an idea long advocated by Shakespeare lovers, and taken up in contemporary times by Wole Soyinka, who formed the Nigerian national theater).  And in 1928, a considerably more feeble Yeats entered politics directly, serving a term in the Irish Senate.  

On Janaury 28, 1939, William Butler Yeats died in Roquebrune, France.  He was buried there, but exhumed nearly a decade later for burial in County Sligo, as he had requested.