Essays on William Butler Yeats

13 June 1865

28 January 1939

Poet, dramatist, prose writer

• “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
• “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
• “Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”
• “What can be explained is not poetry.”

13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939

Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer William Butler Yeats was the preeminent writer of the Irish literary renaissance at the turn of the 20th century. He was also an important figure in European literary Modernism in the 1920s and ’30s.

“A Vision”, “At the Hawk’s Well”, “Easter 1916”, “Four Plays for Dancers”, “Leda and the Swan”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “The Celtic Twilight”, “The Countess Cathleen”, “The Green Helmet”, “The Herne’s Egg”, “The Second Coming”, “The Tower”

The themes of Yeat's poetry cover such wide ranging areas as love, politics, old-age art, aristocracy, violence and prophecy, history myth, courtesy hatred, innocence, anarchy and nostalgia. Additionally, n his early writings, William Butler Yeats evoked a legendary and supernatural Ireland, more pagan than Christian. He hoped to instill pride in the Irish past and support Irish nationalism.

Yeats is considered one of the key twentieth-century English-language poets. He was a Symbolist poet, using allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. He chose words and assembled them so that, in addition to a particular meaning, they suggest abstract thoughts that may seem more significant and resonant. Unlike the modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional forms.

One of Ireland's famous literary sons and its foremost poet, William Butler Yeats was a hugely influential figure in 19th Century Ireland. Yeats helped establish Dublin's Abbey Theatre and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He impacted culture, society, and literature by influencing every poet writing in English today.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
“Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.”