W. B. Yeats
1865–1939
Biography
William Butler Yeats, who published as W. B. Yeats, was an Irish poet, dramatist and critic, born in 1865 at Sandymount near Dublin. He came from a Protestant family of Anglo-Irish descent, and his father was a lawyer who also painted portraits. As a child he spent holidays in County Sligo, and from an early age he was drawn to Irish legend and the occult.
Yeats was one of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival, a movement that drew on Irish legend and history to build a national literature in English. With John Millington Synge and Lady Gregory he founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and he guided it through its first years. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 and later served two terms as a senator of the Irish Free State.
His poetry changed across his life. The early work, shaped by Keats, Blake and Wordsworth, is dreamy and musical and full of Celtic legend and symbol. From about 1900 his verse became more rooted in ordinary life and more openly political, as books such as The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and The Tower (1928) show. The Wind Among the Reeds, published in 1899, belongs to the earlier group, and it is the book credited to him on this site.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
The Wind Among the Reeds
by W. B. Yeats
Yeats's 1899 book of love poems is full of Irish lore, of the sidhe, fishermen and ancient heroes, and its speakers Aedh, Michael Robartes and Hanrahan stand in for the moods of one poet. It includes The Song of Wandering Aengus and Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, without…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.