W.B. Yeats

Born William Butler Yeats on June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, Dublin, the eldest son of the portrait painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen, whose merchant family in Sligo gave the boy his first landscape of myth. Yeats spent his childhood between Dublin, London, and the wild Atlantic coast of County Sligo, absorbing the fairy lore and heroic legends that would fuel his early verse. He studied at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where he met George Russell, but abandoned painting for poetry. His obsessive, unrequited love for the revolutionary Maud Gonne , whom he proposed to repeatedly over decades , became the animating wound of his lyric art. He co-founded the Abbey Theatre in 1904 and wrote plays steeped in Irish mythology, including Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and On Baile’s Strand (1904). The Easter Rising of 1916 transformed his verse, sharpening it with political gravity: “All changed, changed utterly.” In 1917, after Maud’s daughter Iseult also refused him, he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who on their honeymoon began the automatic writing sessions that produced A Vision (1925), his occult system of history. The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933) are among the supreme achievements of twentieth-century poetry. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 and served as a senator of the Irish Free State. Yeats died on January 28, 1939, at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Menton, France. In 1948 his body was returned to Drumcliff churchyard in Sligo, under bare Ben Bulben’s head, where his epitaph reads: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”

In his last years, Yeats told his wife George exactly what to do with his body: bury him at Roquebrune, then, once the newspapers had forgotten him, dig him up and plant him in Sligo. War intervened. Nine years passed before a naval corvette finally carried him home to Drumcliffe.