Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire
W.B.Yeats
(13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939)
William Butler Yeats was an
Irish poet and
dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of
20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish
Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the
Irish Literary Revival, and along with
Lady Gregory and
Edward Martyn founded the
Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature for what the
Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include
The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in
County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both
Irish legends and the
occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to
Edmund Spenser and
Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the
Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. Over the years, Yeats adopted many different ideological positions, including, in the words of the critic Michael Valdez Moses, "those of [the] radical
nationalist,
classical liberal,
reactionary
conservative and
millenarian
nihilist".
