Biography

The Early Years

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin, in 1865. His father's family, of English stock, had been in Ireland for at least two hundred years; his mother's family, the Pollexfens, hailing originally from Devon, had been for some generations in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. J. B. Yeats, his father, had abandoned law to take up painting, at which he made a somewhat precarious living. The family lived in London from 1874 until 1883, when they returned to Ireland to live in Howth, a few miles from Dublin. On leaving high school in Dublin in 1883, Yeats decided to be an artist, with poetry as his avocation, and attended art school; he soon left to concentrate on poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885.

Yeats's childhood and young manhood were spent between Dublin, London, and Sligo, and each of these places contributed something to his poetic development. In London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the day, and in 1891 was one of the founders of the Rhymers' Club, whose members included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and many other characteristic figures of the 1890s. Here he acquired ideas of poetry that were vaguely Pre-Raphaelite: he believed, in this early stage of his career, that a poet's language should be dreamy, evocative, and ethereal. From the countryside around Sligo he got something much more vigorous and earthy- a knowledge of the life of the peasantry and of their folklore. In Dublin he was influenced by the currents of Irish nationalism and, while often in disagreement with those who wished to use literature for crude political ends, he nevertheless learned to see his poetry as a contribution to a rejuvenated Irish culture.

It was in 1889 that Yeats met and fell desperately in love with the beautiful actress and violent Irish nationalist Maud Gonne; he pined after her for many years, though she persistently refused to marry him. The affair is reflected in many of his poems, notably "No Second Troy," published in The Green Helmet. He met Lady Gregory, Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, briefly in 1894, and 1896 she invited him to spend the following summer at her country house, Coole Park, in Galway. Yeats spent many holidays with Lady Gregory and discovered the attractiveness of the "country house ideal," seeing in an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in a great house a method of imposing order on chaos.