William Butler Yeats Research Paper

If you were a poet or an artist back in the twentieth Century, or even if you just have an appreciation for poetry or writing, you probably would recognize the name William Butler Yeats. He was born on June 13, 1865 in Sandymount, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. He was one of the major figures of the twentieth century who was involved in the theater, the arts and writing. William Butler Yeats is considered to be one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century. In fact, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize astonishingly seven times in his lifetime, although he only actually won the award once in 1923. His writings and poetry were heavily influenced not only by his parents’ and grandparents’ Irish roots but they were also influenced

He was born in Ireland, but his family moved to London when he was only two years old. His father, John Butler Yeats, who was a lawyer, decided to desert his law practice and pursue a career in artistry instead. The family was relocated to London so that Yeats’ father could spend more time studying English art. Despite the move, however, Yeats spent a lot of his childhood time back in the suburb of Sligo in Dublin, visiting his grandparents on school holidays and breaks. The scenery and folklore of the countryside there set a precedent in his work and it became the setting of many of his poems during his teen years, perhaps because of a deep longing for what he considered to be his true home. He often described the scenery of Ireland, for example in The Wild Swans at Coole, Yeats

Although the two had extremely different writing styles, and Yeats was almost twenty years Pound’s senior, they formed such a close, yet strangely unlikely friendship that eventually they even shared a cottage together. Pound was expected to be Yeats’ secretary, and Yeats’ thought himself as Pound’s mentor, even though he had already gotten a good start at poetry when the two met. He introduced Yeats to the Japanese theatre, known as Noh, which became important to his later plays. Yeats then wrote several plays that he claimed to be “equal” to the Japanese style, which included the use of masks, elaborate costumes and