William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Born in Dublin, Ireland, on 13th June 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats.
A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped in founding the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years, served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Though his works after 1910 was strongly influenced by Ezra Pound, becoming more modern in its imagery, W. B. Yeats was loyal to the traditional verse forms.
He won the Nobel Prize in the year 1923 for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation. William Butler 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.
His first significant poem was ‘The Island of Statues’, a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser and Shelley for its poetic models.
His first solo publication was the pamphlet ‘Mosada: A Dramatic Poem’. Yeats died in 1939.