William Butler Yeats Research Paper

The face of poetry as a whole in Ireland and in the rest of the world has been changed forever because of one man, William Butler Yeats, who was “the greatest poet of the 20th century”. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and was the leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance. As a Nobel Prize winner, a poet, and a play writer, he was able to write very detailed poems that caught the attention of the reader by utilizing themes and emotions no one else has ever used before in poetry. Yeats uses his experiences in life to allow him to be able to write higher quality poems that draw out thoughts and emotions from the reader. William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865 in Sandymount, Ireland; 20 years after the great Irish potato

They moved to London during his late childhood/adolescence period and he spent a major part of his childhood at his mother’s house in an undeveloped area of northern Ireland. This would later give him the influence to start writing poems about the beauty of nature. At the age of 19, he enrolled in Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin where he would meet the love of his life; Maud Gonne. He kept on getting rejected from his marriage proposals to her but he would eventually get married to a descendant of an anglo-irish family. He would embed his experiences in life into his poems about romance. He wrote his first book of poems in 1889 called The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. From there, he wrote several other collections of Irish folklore including The Celtic Twilight and The Countess Cathleen and later went on to write poems with romantic tales and symbols in them. After countless years of writing poems as a profession, he founded the Irish National Theater Society in 1902 which changed theatrical performances forever. He ran and was elected Irish senator in 1922 and won the Nobel prize for literature in 1923. After this peak of his career and life,

Critics of his poetry claim that “Yeats towers above every other poet in the English language in the 20th century” but he “craved ecstasy and wisdom” and he needs to ”pay more attention to his relationship with his readers”. They feel as if he was always needing something else in his poems and it is sometimes hard to establish a connection between the speaker and the reader in his poems. In the poem written by Yeats titled The Lake Isle of Innisfree, there is a connection between the reader and the speaker but then it gets a little bit confusing past that as he changes the setting and location in a few words which is difficult to catch on unless the reader understand complex poetry. Besides all of the negative criticism, critics praise Yeats as one of the best poets while talking about how great he was at including Irish mythology and several poetic devices into his works. Overall, the criticism of Yeats is very positive and his poems can not be compared to any other because of how great they