William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was born on 13 June 1865 in Sandymount, Dublin, the eldest child of John Butler Yeats, a portrait painter of talent and chronic financial difficulty, and Susan Pollexfen, whose family were prosperous millers and shipowners in Sligo. Yeats spent his childhood between Dublin, London, and Sligo — the Sligo landscape of Ben Bulben, Lough Gill, Drumcliff, and Knocknarea would haunt his poetry for life.

Life and Career

Yeats was educated at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin (where he studied painting, following his father) and at the Godolphin School in Hammersmith, but he was essentially self-educated as a writer, reading voraciously in Romantic poetry, Irish mythology, and the occult. His early verse — collected in The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) — is steeped in the Celtic Twilight: dreamy, musical, full of fairy lore, Gaelic myth, and a longing for an enchanted Ireland that existed primarily in the imagination.

The transformation began around 1900. Yeats became involved in the Irish Literary Revival and co-founded the Abbey Theatre in 1904 with Lady Augusta Gregory and John Millington Synge, dedicating himself to creating a distinctively Irish national drama. His unrequited love for Maud Gonne — the beautiful, fiery nationalist whom he pursued for decades and who repeatedly refused him — was the central emotional drama of his life and the source of some of his greatest poems.

In 1917, at fifty-two, Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, a young Englishwoman with an interest in the occult. On their honeymoon she began producing “automatic writing” — channelled communications from spirits — which Yeats worked up into A Vision (1925), his eccentric but compellingly strange system of historical cycles and personality types. The marriage was happy and produced two children.

The late career — from The Tower (1928) through The Winding Stair (1933) to Last Poems (1939) — represents one of the great flowerings in all of poetry: a man in his sixties and seventies writing with more power, passion, and formal authority than most poets achieve in their youth. Yeats received the Nobel Prize in 1923, served as a senator of the Irish Free State (1922–1928), and remained productive until weeks before his death in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939. His body was reinterred in 1948 at Drumcliff churchyard, County Sligo, under the epitaph he wrote himself: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!”

Major Works and Themes

Yeats is the supreme example of a poet who reinvented himself. The languorous Celtic dreamer of the 1890s became, in his fifties and sixties, a poet of ferocious intellectual energy, writing about politics, violence, aging, sexual desire, and the terrible beauty of Irish history in verse of sinewy, muscular authority.

“Easter, 1916” (written 1916, published 1920) is the great political poem: Yeats’s ambivalent response to the Easter Rising, in which men he had dismissed as mediocre nationalists were transformed by their sacrifice into figures of heroic myth. “A terrible beauty is born” — the refrain is one of the most famous lines in English poetry.

The Tower (1928) is the greatest single collection of the twentieth century. It contains “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” “Leda and the Swan,” and “Meditations in Time of Civil War” — any one of which would secure a reputation. “Sailing to Byzantium” — “That is no country for old men” — is Yeats’s most famous poem and his most sustained meditation on the relationship between the body, the soul, art, and immortality.

“The Second Coming” (1920) — “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” — is the most quoted poem of the twentieth century and has become the default text for any era of political disintegration.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Yeats’s reputation has been secure since the 1920s. T.S. Eliot called him “the greatest poet of our time — certainly the greatest in this language.” W.H. Auden’s elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” cemented his status. He is now universally recognised as the greatest poet of the twentieth century in English, with only Eliot as a serious rival for the title.

His influence on subsequent poetry — on Auden, MacNeice, Heaney, Walcott, and poets across the world — is immense. His plays, though less widely performed, were foundational for the Irish dramatic tradition.

Key Works

• The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)
• The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
• In the Seven Woods (1903)
• Responsibilities (1914)
• The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
• Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
• The Tower (1928)
• The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
• A Vision (1925; revised 1937)
• Last Poems (1939)

Collecting Yeats

William Butler Yeats is the most collected Irish author and one of the most important names in twentieth-century poetry collecting. His bibliography is extensive, spanning over fifty years of publication by multiple publishers, and includes numerous limited and private press editions that are major collectibles.

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889, Kegan Paul, London) is the first book and a significant rarity. Fine copies bring $3,000–$10,000.

The Wind Among the Reeds (1899, Elkin Mathews, London) is the key early collection, containing some of his most famous Celtic Twilight poems. First editions bring $1,000–$4,000.

The Tower (1928, Macmillan, London) is the supreme Yeats collectible — the single most important poetry collection of the twentieth century. The first edition, in blue cloth with gilt spine lettering, was published in an edition of 2,000 copies. Fine copies in the original dust jacket bring $3,000–$10,000; the jacket is scarce.

The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933, Macmillan) is the companion masterpiece. First editions in the jacket bring $1,000–$5,000.

The Cuala Press (earlier Dun Emer Press) editions are the blue-chip Yeats collectibles. Yeats’s sisters, Elizabeth and Susan (“Lolly” and “Lily”), ran the press, and many of Yeats’s works were first published in small Cuala Press editions (typically 250–500 copies) before the Macmillan trade editions. These hand-printed editions, in their characteristic linen-covered boards, are beautiful and rare: $1,000–$10,000 depending on title and condition. In the Seven Woods (1903, Dun Emer Press, 325 copies) is particularly sought after.

Yeats autograph material is available but expensive. He was a prolific correspondent, and letters surface at $1,000–$10,000. Signed copies of his books, particularly the Cuala Press editions, are prized. Major collections are held at the National Library of Ireland, the New York Public Library (the Berg Collection), and the Harry Ransom Center.