64 Facts About WB Yeats

William Butler WB Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature.

WB Yeats 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.

Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent, WB Yeats was born in Sandymount and was educated in Dublin and London and spent childhood holidays in County Sligo.

WB Yeats studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult.

WB Yeats moved away from the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with some elements including cyclical theories of life.

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WB Yeats had become the chief playwright for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897, and early on promoted younger poets such as Ezra Pound.

William Butler WB Yeats was born in Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland.

WB Yeats's father, John Butler Yeats, was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier, linen merchant, and well-known painter, who died in 1712.

At the time of his marriage, William's father, John WB Yeats, was studying law, but would later pursue art studies at Heatherley School of Fine Art, in London.

The Butler WB 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.

WB Yeats was raised a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, which was at the time undergoing a crisis of identity.

In October 1881, WB Yeats resumed his education at Dublin's Erasmus Smith High School.

WB Yeats began writing his first works when he was seventeen; these included a poem—heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley—that describes a magician who set up a throne in central Asia.

In later life, WB Yeats paid tribute to Blake by describing him as one of the "great artificers of God who uttered great truths to a little clan".

In 1891, WB Yeats published John Sherman and "Dhoya", one a novella, the other a story.

In March 1890 WB Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and with Ernest Rhys co-founded the Rhymers' Club, a group of London-based poets who met regularly in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their verse.

WB Yeats later sought to mythologize the collective, calling it the "Tragic Generation" in his autobiography, and published two anthologies of the Rhymers' work, the first one in 1892 and the second one in 1894.

WB Yeats collaborated with Edwin Ellis on the first complete edition of William Blake's works, in the process rediscovering a forgotten poem, "Vala, or, the Four Zoas".

WB Yeats had a lifelong interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology.

WB Yeats read extensively on the subjects throughout his life, became a member of the paranormal research organisation "The Ghost Club" and was influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.

WB Yeats wished to include it in his first collection, but it was deemed too long, and in fact, was never republished in his lifetime.

WB Yeats was admitted into the Golden Dawn in March 1890 and took the magical motto —translated as 'Devil is God inverted'.

WB Yeats was an active recruiter for the sect's Isis-Urania Temple, and brought in his uncle George Pollexfen, Maud Gonne, and Florence Farr.

WB Yeats was involved in the Order's power struggles, both with Farr and Macgregor Mathers, and was involved when Mathers sent Aleister Crowley to repossess Golden Dawn paraphernalia during the "Battle of Blythe Road".

In 1889, WB Yeats met Maud Gonne, a 23-year-old English heiress and ardent Irish nationalist.

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WB Yeats began an obsessive infatuation, and she had a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter.

WB Yeats later admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began".

WB Yeats's refused each proposal, and in 1903, to his dismay, married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride.

In 1895, WB Yeats moved into number 5 Woburn Walk and resided there until 1919.

In 1896, WB Yeats was introduced to Lady Gregory by their mutual friend Edward Martyn.

Synge, Sean O'Casey, and Padraic Colum, WB Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment of the "Irish Literary Revival" movement.

WB Yeats contrasted this with the artistic freedom of the Catholicism found at Notre Dame, which had allowed such a play with themes such as incest and parricide.

WB Yeats desired to stage a production of the Oedipus Rex in Dublin.

WB Yeats remained involved with the Abbey until his death, both as a member of the board and a prolific playwright.

WB Yeats was close to Lady Gregory and her home place of Coole Park, County Galway.

WB Yeats would often visit and stay there as it was a central meeting place for people who supported the resurgence of Irish literature and cultural traditions.

WB Yeats wrote prefaces for two books of Irish mythological tales, compiled by Lady Gregory: Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and Gods and Fighting Men .

WB Yeats was an Irish nationalist, who sought a kind of traditional lifestyle articulated through poems such as 'The Fisherman'.

WB Yeats was a fierce opponent of individualism and political liberalism and saw the fascist movements as a triumph of public order and the needs of the national collective over petty individualism.

WB Yeats proposed in an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, and he both expected and hoped she would turn him down.

WB Yeats's had lived a sad life to this point; conceived as an attempt to reincarnate her short-lived brother, for the first few years of her life she was presented as her mother's adopted niece.

WB Yeats devoted much time to preparing this material for publication as A Vision .

In December 1923, WB Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation".

WB Yeats used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence.

WB Yeats had been appointed to the first Irish Senate in 1922, and was re-appointed for a second term in 1925.

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Early in his tenure, a debate on divorce arose, and WB Yeats viewed the issue as primarily a confrontation between the emerging Roman Catholic ethos and the Protestant minority.

WB Yeats's language became more forceful; the Jesuit Father Peter Finlay was described by Yeats as a man of "monstrous discourtesy", and he lamented that "It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our Bishops in their place in discussions requiring legislation".

WB Yeats memorably said of his fellow Irish Protestants, "we are no petty people".

WB Yeats retired from the Senate in 1928 because of ill health.

Towards the end of his life—and especially after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and Great Depression, which led some to question whether democracy could cope with deep economic difficulty—WB Yeats seems to have returned to his aristocratic sympathies.

WB Yeats died at the Hotel Ideal Sejour, in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939, aged 73.

WB Yeats was buried after a discreet and private funeral at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

WB Yeats's body had earlier been exhumed and transferred to the ossuary.

WB Yeats's epitaph is taken from the last lines of "Under Ben Bulben", one of his final poems:.

WB Yeats repeatedly urges caution and discretion and says the Irish ambassador in Paris should not be informed.

WB Yeats is considered one of the key twentieth-century English-language poets.

WB Yeats was a Symbolist poet, using allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career.

Unlike the modernists who experimented with free verse, WB Yeats was a master of the traditional forms.

WB Yeats wrote prolifically through his final years, and published poetry, plays, and prose.

WB Yeats began by writing epic poems such as The Isle of Statues and The Wanderings of Oisin.

Some critics hold that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting; others question whether late Yeats has much in common with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T S Eliot variety.

In imagery, WB Yeats's poetry became sparer and more powerful as he grew older.

WB Yeats is commemorated in Sligo town by a statue, created in 1989 by sculptor Rowan Gillespie.

WB Yeats had remarked on receiving his Nobel Prize that the Royal Palace in Stockholm "resembled the Ulster Bank in Sligo".