William butler Yeats

About his life

W.B.Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865 and died in 1939.
His father was a lawyer and a portrait painter.
His mother was an owner of a milling and shipping business.
Yeats family over all were highly artistic as most of his siblings got
involved in Art such as his brother and 2 sisters.
He was educated in London and also in Dublin.
During the Summer as a kid he used to go to his family's summer
house at Connaught.

School Life
In 1877 he attended the Godolphin School which he was attended for four years.
He did not distinguish himself academically and his school performance was
described to be only fair with bad spelling.
His most difficult subjects were languages and maths.
Some think the reason for his struggle in school was due to the reason that he was
tone deaf.
Later in 1881 he went to Dublin to Erasmus Smith High School where he resumed
his education.
His fathers studio was near by and he used to go there and also meet many
painters as well as poets and around that time he started to write his own poetry.

Maud Gonne
Maud Gonne was an Irish Nationalist that Yeats had an obsession
over as he was intrigued by her beauty and outspoken manner.
And because of her Yeats poetry also took affect as his obsession
became art.
In 1891 he visited Gonne and proposed marriage but she sadly
rejected him and that is when he said that ''the troubling of my
life began'
He then proposed to her 3 more times but sadly she rejected and
married a different man who was Major John MacBride.

1916 Rising

After the Irish Easter Rising in 1916 W.B.Yeats was shocked about the occurrence and
what was done to his people so he wrote a poem about it titled "Easter 1916".
In this poem he writes about all the main leaders of the rising and how he saw them.
He shows in the poem that he did not respect them at the beginning but soon
afterwards seeing their noble sacrifice he found respect for them.
In the poem he uses the term "A terrible beauty is born" many times and it is a great
line to describe what the rising had done to Ireland as yes it was a terrible disaster
that the people who fought were terribly executed but the beauty of it is that it
sparked off the people of Ireland to make a change and fight for their own freedom.
This poem is seen by many to be his best work of art.

Nobel Prize
In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Noble Prize in
Literature "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic
form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation" which was his
poetry about Ireland including the poem "Easter 1916".
Wining the prize led to a large increase in the sales of his books
and was able to now repay his debts and those of his fathers.