W. B. Yeats
Moved from Celtic dreaminess to hard modern music across fifty years.
Biography
Yeats began in the lush symbolism of the Irish Literary Revival and spent his career stripping it back, a rare example of a major poet becoming more modern with age.
He co-founded the Abbey Theatre, served in the Irish Senate, and received the Nobel Prize in 1923.
Writing Style
- Early work: long musical lines, folklore, mist and lake water.
- Late work: bare syntax, hard consonants, brutal clarity.
- Recurring symbols — towers, gyres, birds — built into a private system.
Influence & Legacy
The template for a poet who publicly revises their own aesthetic, and a permanent argument that national material can be handled without sentimentality.
Famous Poems
About This Entry
This is a brief, opinionated introduction to W. B. Yeats — not a comprehensive biography. For detailed scholarship, consult the volumes listed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography or the relevant collections of letters and criticism. The goal here is to give you enough context to read the poems with fresh eyes.