Messano Maria Like Wordsworth, he believed that poetry is nothing less than ‘the true voice of feeling’.

William Butler Yeats was born in the middle-class suburb of Sandymount on the shores of Dublin Bay. He belonged, as have so many great Irish writers, to the ranks of the Irish Protestants, known generally as the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.

Childhood holidays with his mother's wealthy family in Sligo in the West of Ireland fuelled a life-long passion for myths, geography and history of Ireland. Much of his poetry recalls local beauty spots such as the Isle of Innisfree.

His early poems were influenced by the Romantics, particularly Blake, the French Symbolists and the Pre- Raphaelite Movement. His first published work consists of a long narrative poem, The Wandering of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), which clearly shows his debt to the Romantics.

This was soon followed by two collections of lyrics The Rose (1893) and The Wind among the Reeds (1899), both typical of his early romantic and symbolist manner.

His interest in Irish nationalism intensified in 1889 when he met Maud Gonne, an unrequited passion and the inspiration for his love poetry, who he described as "the troubling of my life".

As a cultural nationalist Yeats believed his writing could help maintain a sense of the national spirit. In 1896 Yeats met Lady Gregory and together they helped found Dublin's Abbey Theatre, where his own plays were performed.

Yeats wrote 26 plays including The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894),

At the Hawk's Well (1917), The Cat and the Moon (1917) and was involved in the running of the theatre for many years.

Yeats’s experience as a playwright was very important as it helped him in his search for a poetic language closer to living speech. In 1912, Yeats met the American Modernist poet Ezra Pound, and for a period of time they shared a cottage together in England.

The influence of Modernism can be seen in Yeats’s poetry of this middle period which moves away from a traditional Irish influence to a contemporary reality of Ireland’s political struggle. A key poem from this period is “Easter 1916” published in the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) in which Yeats reflects on the Easter Rising of 1916 both politically and personally and comments on the change brought about by the sacrifice of the leaders in the refrain: “ A terrible beauty is born”.

During the years of Yeats’s poems became more introspective, meditating on memory, old age and death. They are often permeated by a complex symbolic system partly based on mysticism and esoteric thought. Like Eliot, Yeats developed his own symbolism, and this makes his later work more obscure and difficult to understand.

In this period he produced what is often considered his greatest poetry: The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), A Full Moon in March ( 1935) and Last Poems ( ).

Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

His death, in 1939, provoked one of W.H. Auden's finest poems, In Memory of W. B. Yeats.