Poetry Reading by Shanid.
W.B. YEATS (1865-1939)*
Born William Butler Yeats in Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland. Family was initially well-off, father was a barrister, mother came from landed gentry. This all changed when father decided to become a portrait painter in London. Educated at the Godolphin School, London (1877), Erasmus Smith High School, Dublin (1881), The Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin (1884). Yeats started to write when he was 17; he published in a variety of styles and forms. In 1889, he published 'The Wanderings of Oisin' but more importantly he met Maud Gonne. A woman that was impressed by his poetry but rejected his romantic advances; Gonne became an obsession for Yeats; he proposed marriage to her multiple times over the next 27 years. Yeats became one of the driving forces of the 'Irish Literary Revival (1897), a group dedicated to producing identifiable Irish cultural content. The group staged a play in 1901; in 1904, they established The Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland. Yeats failed to recognise the merits of those that led the 'Easter Rising', an Irish rebellion against English rule in 1916. In 1917, 51-year-old Yeats had an offer of marriage rejected by Maud Gonne's daughter (21 years old) but he married Georgie Hyde-Lees (25) later the same year. In 1922, he was made a Senator for the Irish Free State. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923; he accepted his prize as a representative of Irish literature and the new Free State. Died in 1939 in Menton, France. Yeats is frequently described as Ireland's greatest writer.
Further reading:
'The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats' (Wordsworth Poetry Library)
'W.B. Yeats - 80th Anniversary Collection' (Faber and Faber)