W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount in 1865, a Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent whose father painted portraits and practised law. Educated in Dublin and London, he spent childhood summers in County Sligo and studied poetry early, drawn to Irish legend and the occult. His earliest verse, published in 1889, moved slowly and dreamily, indebted to Spenser, Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelites. By 1897 he had become chief playwright for the Irish Literary Theatre; three years later his poetry began to shift - more physical, more rooted, more political, shedding the transcendental for cyclical theories of life and the hard facts of the world. Along with Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge, he founded the Abbey Theatre and served as its chief in the early years, promoting younger poets like Ezra Pound and driving the Irish Literary Revival. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 and later served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He died on 28 January 1939, leaving behind major works including "Cathleen ni Houlihan," "The Wild Swans at Coole," and "The Tower" - a body of work that tracked one man's passage from soft legend to the gran