Name: Birth Date: Death Date: Place of Birth: Place of Death: Nationality: Gender: Occupations:

William Butler Yeats June 13, 1865 January 28, 1939 Dublin, Ireland Roquebrune, France Irish Male poet, dramatist

Encyclopedia of World Biography on William Butler Yeats Biography Essay

William Butler Yeats, probably the twentieth century's greatest poet in English and certainly one of its most complex men, was born in the Dublin suburb of Sandymount on 13 June 1865. He was the eldest of the four surviving children, all brilliant, of a brilliant and problematical father, the painter-philosopher John Butler Yeats, and his muted and problematical wife, Susan Pollexfen Yeats. It was John Butler Yeats who spoke what his son called in his autobiography "the only eulogy that ever turned my head": "by marriage with a Pollexfen, we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs." W. B. Yeats's impassioned mystique of lineage, of name and place and history, is found at its most concentrated in the dedicatory lines beginning "Pardon, old fathers . . . " of his 1914 volume Responsibilities. There Yeats phrased his grief and shame over the case that a "barren passion," his long hopeless pursuit of Maud Gonne, unnamed, had left him at forty-nine with "no child
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is regarded as not only the most important Irish poet, but also as one of the most important English language poets, of the 20th century. He was a key figure in the Irish Cultural Revival, his later poems made a significant contribution to Modernism, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeatss life, and his poetry, bridged the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a youth he studied art in fin de sicle London and absorbed the prevailing outlook of aestheticism, which was also expressed in the writing of Oscar Wilde, and the painting and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites. He was also influenced by the French Symbolist poets, and developed a lifelong interest in mysticism and the occult, which fed into his poetry, lifting it above the concerns of everyday life. His early poems, the first being published when he was twenty, are characterised by a dreamy romanticism in both their form and content. He was interested in the Gaelic language, song, and folklore, and used effects borrowed from Gaelic literature in his own poems. He wanted to reawaken Ireland to its ancient literature. According to an article written a year before his death, his efforts had a mixed reception. On the one hand,

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

I think lake isle of innisfree is a poem that pleases one ssenses and soothes ones mind. Its a very good poem with a very good meaning which can even be understood by any dumb person as yeats has used simple diction.I think one could sense the peacefulness that yeats mentions even by reading it just once. It makes you calm and one could even feel that he is at the peace that budddhism mentions,enlightenment. Even the words used by yeats have a sense of tranquil in them.They are very nice,smooth words.When we go through the poem you would even feel that you are a very free person although you are not,i mean although you are at the midst of a chaotic life. I would appreciate if someone could please add more facts to my idea that \"LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE IS A POEM THAT PLEASES THE SENSES AND SOOTHES THE MIND\" THANKS