William butler yeats biography summary template

Compare and Contrast. What Do I Read Next? Further Study. Copyright Information. The Song of Wandering Aengus. The Stolen Child Poem. Adam's Curse. Print Word PDF. This section contains words approx. View a FREE sample. More summaries and resources for teaching or studying Autobiographies. Autobiographies from Gale. The piece was serialized in the Dublin University Review.

Yeats wished to include it in his first collection, but it was deemed too long, and in fact, was never republished in his lifetime. Quinx Books published the poem in complete form for the first time in His first solo publication was the pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem , which comprised a print run of copies paid for by his father. This was followed by the collection The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems , which arranged a series of verse that dated as far back as the mids.

The long title poem contains, in the words of his biographer R. Foster , "obscure Gaelic names, striking repetitions [and] an unremitting rhythm subtly varied as the poem proceeded through its three sections": [ 34 ]. We rode in sorrow, with strong hounds three, Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair, On a morning misty and mild and fair. The mist-drops hung on the fragrant trees, And in the blossoms hung the bees.

We rode in sadness above Lough Lean, For our best were dead on Gavra's green. Oisin introduces what was to become one of his most important themes: the appeal of the life of contemplation over the appeal of the life of action. Following the work, Yeats never again attempted another long poem. His other early poems, which are meditations on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects, include Poems , The Secret Rose , and The Wind Among the Reeds The covers of these volumes were illustrated by Yeats's friend Althea Gyles.

In Yeats and Ernest Rhys co-founded the Rhymers' Club , [ 37 ] a group of London-based poets who met regularly in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their verse. Yeats later sought to mythologize the collective, calling it the "Tragic Generation" in his autobiography, [ 38 ] and published two anthologies of the Rhymers' work, the first one in and the second one in He collaborated with Edwin Ellis on the first complete edition of William Blake's works, in the process rediscovering a forgotten poem, "Vala, or, the Four Zoas".

Yeats began an obsessive infatuation, and she had a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter. In he visited Gonne in Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He later admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began". She refused each proposal, and in , to his dismay, married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride.

Yeats derided MacBride in letters and in poetry. He worried his muse would come under the influence of the priests and do their bidding. Gonne's marriage to MacBride was a disaster. This pleased Yeats, as Gonne began to visit him in London. Despite the use of intermediaries, a divorce case ensued in Paris in Gonne made a series of allegations against her husband with Yeats as her main 'second', though he did not attend court or travel to France.

A divorce was not granted, for the only accusation that held up in court was that MacBride had been drunk once during the marriage. A separation was granted, with Gonne having custody of the baby and MacBride having visiting rights. In , Yeats moved into number 5 Woburn Walk and resided there until Yeats's friendship with Gonne ended, yet, in Paris in , they finally consummated their relationship.

Yeats was less sentimental and later remarked that "the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul. My arms are like the twisted thorn And yet there beauty lay; The first of all the tribe lay there And did such pleasure take; She who had brought great Hector down And put all Troy to wreck. Gregory encouraged Yeats's nationalism and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama.

Although he was influenced by French Symbolism , Yeats concentrated on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors. Together with Lady Gregory, Martyn, and other writers including J. One of the most significant of these was Douglas Hyde , later the first President of Ireland, whose Love Songs of Connacht was widely admired.

Stopping to deliver a lecture at the University of Notre Dame , he learned about the student production of the Oedipus Rex. The collective survived for about two years but was unsuccessful. Yeats remained involved with the Abbey until his death, both as a member of the board and a prolific playwright. In , he helped set up the Dun Emer Press to publish work by writers associated with the Revival.

This became the Cuala Press in , and inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, sought to "find work for Irish hands in the making of beautiful things. Yeats met the American poet Ezra Pound in Pound had travelled to London at least partly to meet the older man, whom he considered "the only poet worthy of serious study. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for the publication in the magazine Poetry of some of Yeats's verse with Pound's own unauthorised alterations.

These changes reflected Pound's distaste for Victorian prosody. A more indirect influence was the scholarship on Japanese Noh plays that Pound had obtained from Ernest Fenollosa 's widow, which provided Yeats with a model for the aristocratic drama he intended to write. The first of his plays modelled on Noh was At the Hawk's Well , the first draft of which he dictated to Pound in January The emergence of a nationalist revolutionary movement from the ranks of the mostly Roman Catholic lower-middle and working class made Yeats reassess some of his attitudes.

He would often visit and stay there as it was a central meeting place for people who supported the resurgence of Irish literature and cultural traditions. His poem, " The Wild Swans at Coole " was written there, between and In the preface of the latter, he wrote: "One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many incidents, woven into one great event of, let us say the War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne or that of the last gathering at Muirthemne.

Yeats was an Irish nationalist , who sought a kind of traditional lifestyle articulated through poems such as 'The Fisherman'. But as his life progressed, he sheltered much of his revolutionary spirit and distanced himself from the intense political landscape until , when he was appointed Senator for the Irish Free State. In the earlier part of his life, Yeats was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

He was a fierce opponent of individualism and political liberalism and saw the fascist movements as a triumph of public order and the needs of the national collective over petty individualism. He was an elitist who abhorred the idea of mob-rule, and saw democracy as a threat to good governance and public order.

William butler yeats biography summary template

By , Yeats was 51 years old and determined to marry and produce an heir. Foster has observed that Yeats's last offer was motivated more by a sense of duty than by a genuine desire to marry her. Yeats proposed in an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, and he both expected and hoped she would turn him down. According to Foster, "when he duly asked Maud to marry him and was duly refused, his thoughts shifted with surprising speed to her daughter.

She had lived a sad life to this point; conceived as an attempt to reincarnate her short-lived brother, for the first few years of her life she was presented as her mother's adopted niece. When Maud told her that she was going to marry, Iseult cried and told her mother that she hated MacBride. At fifteen, she proposed to Yeats. In , he proposed to Iseult but was rejected.

Despite warnings from her friends—"George He must be dead"—Hyde-Lees accepted, and the two were married on 20 October The couple went on to have two children, Anne and Michael. Although in later years he had romantic relationships with other women, Georgie herself wrote to her husband, "When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were.

During the first years of marriage, they experimented with automatic writing ; she contacted a variety of spirits and guides they called "Instructors" while in a trance. The spirits communicated a complex and esoteric system of philosophy and history, which the couple developed into an exposition using geometrical shapes: phases, cones, and gyres.

In , he wrote to his publisher T. Werner Laurie, admitting, "I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books. In December , Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation". His reply to many of the letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: "I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe's welcome to the Free State.

Yeats used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence. As he remarked, "The theatres of Dublin were empty buildings hired by the English travelling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought of these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical because the nationalism we had called up—the nationalism every generation had called up in moments of discouragement—was romantic and poetical.

For the first time he had money, and he was able to repay not only his own debts but those of his father. By early , Yeats's health had stabilised, and he had completed most of the writing for A Vision. Dated , it actually appeared in January , when he almost immediately started rewriting it for a second version. He had been appointed to the first Irish Senate in , and was re-appointed for a second term in In response, Yeats delivered a series of speeches that attacked the "quixotically impressive" ambitions of the government and clergy, likening their campaign tactics to those of "medieval Spain.

This conviction has come to us through ancient philosophy and modern literature, and it seems to us a most sacrilegious thing to persuade two people who hate each other His language became more forceful; the Jesuit Father Peter Finlay was described by Yeats as a man of "monstrous discourtesy", and he lamented that "It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our Bishops in their place in discussions requiring legislation.

You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation. In he chaired a coinage committee charged with selecting a set of designs for the first currency of the Irish Free State. Aware of the symbolic power latent in the imagery of a young state's currency, he sought a form that was "elegant, racy of the soil, and utterly unpolitical". Towards the end of his life—and especially after the Wall Street crash of and Great Depression , which led some to question whether democracy could cope with deep economic difficulty—Yeats seems to have returned to his aristocratic sympathies.

Although he faced difficulties in languages and mathematics, he was good in Latin. William and his family stayed in England until , but then moved back to Dublin due to some financial problems. This is where he would spend his leisure time, and he got acquainted with the well-known writers and artists of the city. It was at this time that William became eagerly interested in poetry and began writing.

Subsequently, the Dublin University Review acknowledged his talent and published a collection of his first poems in He was only seventeen when he wrote his first popular works under the influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley , Edmund Spencer, and William Blake. There are two common methods by which Yeats wrote poetry. The first method is spontaneous, whereas the other process is laborious and involves substitution and alteration.

His spontaneous method belongs to his early period of writing, and he relied chiefly upon the inspiration and temptation of artistic creation without any effort. Whereas, in the later periods of his writing, he inflicted upon himself great pains and polish his verses time and again. Like Ernest Hemingway, he was a painstaking writer who attempted to say in the best possible words.

His late artistic method is greatly depicted in his poems. His poetry is characterized by the dreamy flourishing style dull of lulling rhythms. His early poetry has a mostly pensive and nostalgic tone. Like Edmund Spenser, his poetry also had an abundance of exaggerated imagery. It is so admirable that a great poet like Yeats soon grew dissatisfied with his ornate style in verse, and attempted to make his verse more simple, and bringing it near to the ordinary speech of daily use.

He abandoned the archaism and poeticism in his poetry. In his later poetry, the imager also turned more certain, appropriate, and developed a sharp quality. He started using brief and terse diction, and consequently, his poetry matured in density. He employed accurate and definite rhythm, and most importantly, it matches the demands of sublimity and grandeur of language and subject without putting much effort.

It has developed into sharp and became adapted to an inclusive range of ideas and concepts. He can easily put simple facts in simple words. His command over the meter and versification was also remarkable during his early period. At that time, he also had close correspondence between the mood and language for his escapist poem his early poetry is much associated with the escapist poetry of Romanticism.

In order to keep the fantastical atmosphere in his early poems, he employed half-spelled rhythm. Similarly, in order to keep pace with the theme of the poem in his later poetry, Yeats developed more varied, subtler, and intensely more adaptable rhythms. He also used a more inclusive vocabulary. Consequently, his metaphors appeared to be fresh with a wide range of references.

Metaphorical aphorism is also observed in his poetry. For example: In his later poetry, again in keeping with his thematic content, Yeats was able to develop subtler, more varied, and dramatically more adaptable rhythms. His vocabulary had also become more inclusive. As a result, the metaphors were fresher and their range of reference wider.

We also find that he employs the metaphorical aphorism. His use of epigram is a properly poetic one, giving the reader a shock of surprise.