Short biography of William Butler Yeats

An Anglo-Irishman, William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin, Ireland,on June 13,1865. His father, John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier and linen merchant who died in 1712.

.He was also a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. His mother, Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo, in western Ireland. Through both parents Yeats claimed kinship with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families who are mentioned in his work.

At the time of his marriage, John Yeats was studying law but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherley's Art School in London. Yeats grew up as a member of the former Protestant Ascendancy at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. Yeats’s best hope, he felt, was to cultivate a tradition more profound than either the Catholic or the Protestant. In 1880 his family moved back to Dublin, where he attended the high school. In 1883 he attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where the most important part of his education was in meeting other poets and artists.

Meanwhile, Yeats started to write: his first publication, two brief lyrics, appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885. When the family moved back to London in 1887, Yeats took up the life of a professional writer. He joined theTheosophical Society, whose mysticism appealed to him because it was a form of imaginative life.

In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of W.B.Y." Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology. He read extensively on the subjects throughout his life, became a member of the paranormal research organization. . However, some critics have dismissed these influences as lacking in intellectual credibility.

In particular, W. H. Auden criticised this aspect of Yeats' work as the "deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India."

Yeats was already a proud young man, and his pride required him to rely on his own taste and his sense of artistic style. He was not boastful, but spiritual arrogance. Yeats published several volumes of poetry during this period, notably Poems(1895) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), which are typical of his early verse in their dreamlike atmosphere and their use of Irish folklore and legend. But in the collections In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet (1910), Yeats slowly discarded the Pre-Raphaelite colours and rhythms of his early verse and purged it of certain Celtic and esoteric influences.

In 1917 Yeats published The Wild Swans at Coole. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Now a celebrated figure, he was indisputably one of the most significant modern poets of the 20^th  Century literature. ). Yeats was a very good friend of Indian Bengali poet Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.