Uilyam Batler Yeyts

William Butler Yeats (also transliterated as Yeats, Yets, Eyts) was an Irish English-language poet and playwright. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

The poet’s father, John Butler Yeats, studied law, but when his son was two years old, he decisively broke with the legal profession and went to London to study painting. He became a portrait painter. William’s younger brother was the well-known Irish artist Jack Butler Yeats. In 1880, the Yeats family returned to Ireland and settled in a suburb of Dublin. In Dublin, William Yeats finished school and, with his father’s approval, entered art school.

William Yeats began writing poetry early, and his talent was noticed quite quickly. Among the poets who responded favorably to his early work were William Henley, Gerard Hopkins, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde.

In 1885, Yeats met John O’Leary, a member of the Irish secret society of the Fenians, who had returned to Dublin after many years of imprisonment and exile. Under the influence of this new acquaintance, Yeats began writing poems and articles in a patriotic vein, and his poetics came to include numerous images from ancient Irish Celtic culture. Yeats’s interest in occultism also emerged early. While still at art school, he met George Russell, later a well-known poet and occultist writing under the pseudonym A. E. Together with several others, they founded a Hermetic Society for the study of magic and Eastern religions, with Yeats as chairman. In the mid-1880s, he briefly joined the Theosophical Society, but soon became disillusioned with it.

On January 30, 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, who became his lifelong love. She was an active participant in Ireland’s independence movement and drew Yeats into political struggle. Yeats did not abandon his interest in occult disciplines either; in 1890 he joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, founded shortly before by his acquaintance MacGregor Mathers.

In 1899, Yeats’s poetry collection The Wind Among the Reeds was published; according to critics, it was the chief achievement of the early stage of his career. The imagery of Ye