The Dublin-born poet was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival in the late 19th century and scooped the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 for his "always inspired poetry.". Only a few weeks earlier Iseult Gonne, the daughter of Maud Gonne whom Yeats had loved for many years, had rejected Yeats' marriage proposal. [2], Her mother often brought young musicians and artists she had recently met to Olivia Shakespear's salon, many of whom became well-known modernists, including Ezra Pound, Walter Rummel, and Frederic Manning. Fairy and Folk Tales George, the Yeats children Michael and Anne, Yeats’s brother Jack, and an Irish military guard of honour met the ship at Galway harbour on September 17th, 1948. Though Yeats may have benefited on a personal level from a marriage with Gonne -- though that is dubious -- English literature would most surely have lost out. Irish poet and dramatist. “He died ready,” Seamus Heaney wrote in this newspaper on January 28th, 1989, in an article marking the 50th anniversary of Yeats’s death. copied down these fragments and incorporated them into his occult The account details entered are not currently associated with an Irish Times subscription. Yeats’s wife, George, and his last mistress, Edith Shackleton Heald, were at his bedside. Ireland had newly become independent at that time and he was the first Irish man to be honored with the coveted prize. thousand years a new cycle, which is the opposite of the cycle that has He proposed to her daughter, Iseult MacBride, only to be She rejected him, and was to reject his proposal on three further occasions. Here Yeats delves into the Irish Mythology of the Fenian Cycle. The poem's refrain, "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, it's with O'Leary in the grave", is one of Yeats' best-remembered and most-quoted lines. According to Foster, though, Yeats was "no longer capable of full intercourse, his relationship with Edith was intensely sexual: surviving blurry snapshots show her sunbathing bare-breasted in the ... garden under his rapturous gaze". deepest love. He had wasted by what Yeats considered an unsuitable marriage and her No aestheticism (a belief that art and beauty are important for everything) “It was a simple place,” says Oxford professor Roy Foster, author of the two-volume WB Yeats: A Life. Macrae, Alistair D. F. It was in their company in 1910 or 1911, as a seventeen-year-old, that one morning she met Yeats at the British Museum and again that afternoon during tea at the Shakespears. Yeats eventually took a flat close to her in London and it was here they enjoyed many passionate evenings together. William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Dublin, Ireland. That, of course, is "The Lakeisle of Innisfree", which deals with Yeats' longing to escape the hustle and bustle of city life and relocate to an island in the middle of Lough Gill in Sligo. retired there because of ill health. birth of Christ begins one cycle, which ends, as the poem ends, with a Georgie, who was well-off, was believed by her family to have second sight and her interest -- and apparent expertise -- in occultism intrigued the poet. As he had done with Farr, Yeats introduced Georgie to the Order of the Golden Dawn and was her sponsor in 1915. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. Yeats: A Life. the greatest poets and a major figure in the Irish literary renaissance and modern Irish history. volume of poems He followed this with his collection of At the age of nineteen Yeats enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art Dublin. Heaney’s tributeBy writing almost to the moment of his death, Yeats seemed to embody the notion of the poet’s intended life. It is arguably Yeats' magnum opus and the poem's refrain has left an indelible mark on Irish culture. On this day: Irish writer William Butler Yeats was born in 1865, Irish singer’s haunting version of WB Yeats' "16 Dead Men". Among his acquaintances at In the long title poem he began his celebration By the autumn of 1898, Gonne had ended her relationship with Millevoye. A daughter, Anne Butler Yeats, was born in 1919, and a son, If all else failed he could still arouse his mind. The Celtic Twilight Heaney lived through and wrote about the Troubles. He Much of Yeats early poetry was influenced by religious symbols, Irish mythology and the romantics most notably Shelley. [1] Georgie died on 23 August 1968. An important milestone in the history of the modern theater occurred in romantic tales and mood sketches, William felt its influence They met at the British Museum and later on the same day at the Shakespears' where they had afternoon tea. In 1887 he became a literary In accordance with his last wishes, Yeats is buried at the Drumcliffe Church in County Sligo that his grandfather once practiced.