Yeats, William Butler

(1865-1939)

   Born in Dublin, the son of an artist, he was educated in London, Dublin High School, then until 1886, at the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin. Principal dates: founding member of the Irish Literature Society in London and Dublin, 1891-1892; senator of the Irish Free State, 1992-1928; honorary degree from Dublin University, 1922; Nobel Prize for literature, 1923; founding member of the Irish Academy of Letters, 1932; United States lecture tour, 1932; In the Poet's Parlor, In the Poet's Pub radio series, 1937; honorary degree, Oxford University, 1931; honorary degree, Cambridge University, 1933. He died and was buried at Roquebrune, France. In 1948 his remains were reburied at Drumcliffe, near Sligo, Ireland. He edited The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) and published essays, plays, fairy tales and leg428 ends. Some of his poetry was influenced by his wife's mystic communications through "automatic writing." Some of his poems: "Adam's Curse," "Alfred: A Masque," "An Acre of Grass," "Before the World Was Made," "The Witch," "Two Songs of a Fool," "Under Ben Bulben," "Wisdom," "Young Man's Song."

   Sources: A Little Book of Irish Verse. Chronicle Books, 1993. An Anthology of Irish Verse: The Poetry of Ireland from Mythological Times to the Present. Padraic Colum, ed. Liveright, 1948. Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America. 5th edition. Gerald DeWitt Sanders and John Herbert Nelson, eds., Macmillan, 1970. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Richard J. Finneran, ed. Macmillan, 1989. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.