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William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, and mystic who signed his works W. B. Yeats. Although born to an Anglo-Irish mother and father, Yeats was one of the primary driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre[1]. Yeats also served as an Irish Senator in his later years. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for what the Nobel Committee described as "his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation".

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin. His father, John Butler Yeats, a clergyman's son, was a lawyer turned to an Irish Pre-Raphaelite painter. Yeats' mother, Susan Pollexfen, came from a wealthy family - the Pollexfens had a prosperous milling and shipping business.

When Yeats was young, his family moved first from Sandymount, County Dublin, to County Sligo, and then to London to enable his father John to further his career as an artist. At first, the Yeats children were educated at home. Their mother, who was homesick for Sligo, entertained them with stories and folktales from her county of birth.

In 1877, William entered the Godolphin school, which he attended for four years. He did not distinguish himself academically. For financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin toward the end of 1880, living at first in the city centre and later in the suburb of Howth.

In October 1881, Yeats resumed his education at the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin (The High School, Dublin). His father's studio was located nearby and he spent a great deal of time there, meeting many of the city's artists and writers. He remained at the high school until December 1883.

It was during this period that he started writing poetry and in 1885, Yeats' first poems, as well as an essay called "The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson", were published in the Dublin University Review. From 1884 to 1886, he attended the Metropolitan School of Art (now the National College of Art and Design) in Kildare Street.

Yeats' early work tended to focus on the Romantic style, based on Irish lore, best described by the title of his 1893 collection The Celtic Twilight. In his 40s, inspired by his relationships with modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and his involvement in Irish nationalist politics, he moved towards a harder, more modern style.

Even before he began to write poetry, Yeats had come to associate poetry with religious ideas and thoughts of sentimental elements. Describing his childhood in later years, he described his "one unshakable belief" as "whatever of philosophy has been made poetry is alone permanent... I thought... that if a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world."

Yeats' early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore and drew on the diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse. Major poetic influences in these years - and probably throughout the rest of his career as well - were William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He worked on the first complete edition of Blake's works with a friend of his father's, Edwin Ellis, and discovered an unknown poem, Vala, or the Four Zoas. In a late essay on Shelley he wrote, "I have re-read Prometheus Unbound... and it seems to me to have an even more certain place than I had thought among the sacred books of the world."

Yeats' first significant poem was The Isle of Statues, a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser for its poetic model. It appeared in Dublin University Review and was never republished. His first book publication was the pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), which had already appeared in the same journal, and this printing of 100 copies was paid for by his father. Following this was The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889).

The long title poem, the first that he would not disown in his maturity, was based on the poems of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology. This poem, which took two years to complete, shows the influence of Ferguson and the Pre-Raphaelites. It introduced what was to become one of his most important themes: the appeal of the life of contemplation vs. the appeal of the life of action. After The Wanderings of Oisin, he never attempted another long poem. His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects.

The Yeats family had returned to London in 1887, and in 1890 Yeats co-founded the Rhymer's Club with Ernest Rhys. This was a group of like-minded poets who met regularly and published anthologies in 1892 and 1894. Other early collections include Poems (1895)., The Secret Rose (1897) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).

Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology. He read extensively on these subjects all through his life, being especially impressed and influenced by the writings of Swedenborg.

In 1885, he and friends formed the Dublin Hermetic Order. This society held its first meeting on 16 June, with Yeats in the chair. The same year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge was opened with the involvement of Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee who came from the Theosophical Society in London to lecture. Yeats attended his first séance the following year. Later, Yeats became heavily involved with the Theosophical Society and hermeticism, especially the eclectic Rosicrucianism of the Golden Dawn (below). During séances from 1912 a spirit calling itself "Leo Africanus" apparently claimed to be Yeats's Daimon or anti-self, inspiring some of the speculations in Per Amica Silentia Lunae. After his marriage in 1917, he and his wife engaged in a form of automatic writing over the course of over five years, Mrs. Yeats contacting a variety of spirits and guides, which they termed "Instructors" as they communicated a complex esoteric system of character and history based upon spiral gyres and symbolised by the phases of the moon. Yeats devoted much time to preparing this material for publication as A Vision (1925; majorly revised second edition, 1937), writing to his publisher in 1924: "I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books".

Yeats' mystical inclinations, informed by the writings of Swedenborg and Hindu religion (Yeats translated The Ten Principal Upanishads (1938) with Shri Purohit Swami), theosophical ideas, the occult and above all the system of A Vision, formed much of the basis of his late poetry, though he himself had written as far back as 1892: "If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."

Yeats was admitted into the Golden Dawn in March 1890, taking the magical motto Daemon est Deus inversus (D.E.D.I. for short) translated as Devil is God inverted or A demon is a god reflected, this name being taken from the writings of Madame Blavatsky in which she discussed that "...even that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of both good and evil" and uses it to symbolise the Astral Light.

Yeats was an active recruiter for the Golden Dawn's Isis-Urania temple, bringing in George Pollexfen (his uncle), Maud Gonne and Florence Farr. He became involved in the Order's power-struggles both with Farr on one hand and with Macgregor Mathers on the other, most notably when Mathers sent Aleister Crowley to repossess Golden Dawn paraphernalia in "the Battle of Blythe Road". After the Golden Dawn ceased to be and splintered into various offshoots, he remained with the Stella Matutina until 1921.

In 1913, Yeats met American poet Ezra Pound. Pound traveled to London to meet the older man, whom he considered "the only poet worthy of serious study". From that year until 1916, the two men wintered in the Stone Cottage at Ashdown Forest, with Pound nominally acting as Yeats' secretary. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for the publication in the magazine Poetry of some of Yeats' verse with Pound's own unauthorised alterations.

These changes reflected Pound's distaste for Victorian prosody. In particular, the scholarship on Japanese Noh plays that Pound had obtained from Ernest Fenollosa's widow provided Yeats with a model for the aristocratic drama he intended to write. The first of his plays modeled on Noh was At the Hawk's Well, the first draft of which he dictated to Pound in January 1916.

Yeats is generally considered to be one of the twentieth century's key English-language poets. Yet, unlike most modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional verse forms. The impact of modernism on Yeats' work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favour of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet.