YEASTS, WILLIAM BUTLER

His father, an Irish Protestant, was a painter, and the young Yeats himself studied painting for three years, but soon abandoned it for literature. Although he spent his formative years in London, adhering to the aesthetic movement, he drew largely in his early poetry from the folklore of his native Ireland. His life and cultural experiences were highly complex. He led the Irish Literary Revival and, though he did not take an active part in politics, he embraced the cause of Irish nationalism. Alongside Lady Gregory, he founded the Irish National Theatre Society, though the plays he wrote do not excel in dramatic quality; indeed, alongside the influences of Maeterlinck’s symbolist theatre, they reveal the fundamental lyricism of his inspiration. Other influences he derived from Blake, whose work he edited (1893), from Mallarmé and, in general, from the French symbolists, both directly and indirectly through their interpreter, Arthur Symons. Nor should the contribution of Shelley, Keats, Spenser, and Morris be forgotten, especially in his early verse. More complex were the esoteric experiences of his later years and old age: astrology, philosophy, spiritualism, Hermetic writings, Eastern philosophies, which the poet partly recorded in his autobiographical writings, where an obscure symbolism recurs and allusion is made to a perennial conflict between being and becoming. The poems of his old age contain lines of rare beauty, though they abound in sensual and almost brutal touches. At the same time, his work took on an increasingly pessimistic and apocalyptic tone. In one of his poems, *The Second Coming*, vehement and almost blasphemous, one seems to read a dark premonition of the Second World War. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1923.