SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

William butler Yeats

Born in Dublin , Ireland , in 1865 , William Butler Yeats was the son of a well - known Irish  painter , John Butler Yeats , He spent his childhood in Country Sligo ,where his parents were raised ,and in London .He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to  continue his education and study painting , but quickly discovered he preferred poetry .Born into the Anglo-Irish Landowning class, Yeats  became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule  in Ireland during the Victorian period , which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Gaelic himself ,his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne , whom he met in 1889 , a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty .Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, George Hyde Less ) she  remained a powerful  figure in his poetry .

Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland ,and in the twenties , despite Irish independence from England ,his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe ,paralleling the increasing conservatives’ of his American counter parts in London . T. S Eliot and Ezra pound .His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by pound ,becoming his strict adherence  to traditional verse forms .He had a life - long interest in mysticism and the  occult ,which was off -putting to some readers . but he remained uninhabited in advancing idiosyncratic philosophy and his poetry  continued to grow stranger as he grew older .Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922 ,he is  remembered as an important cultural leader ,as a major playwright (he was one  of the founders of the famous Abbey  theatre in Dublin ),and as one of the very greatest poets - in any language of the century .W.B. yeas was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73.