William Butler Yeats, born on June 13th, 1865 in Dublin, Ireland, was an incredibly talented Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer, and one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats is considered one of the greatest poets in the English language because he was devoted to the cause of Irish nationalism and played an important part in the Celtic Revival Movement, promoting the literary heritage of Ireland through his use of material from ancient Irish sagas.
Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, was a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo, in western Ireland. Normally, Yeats
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He became friends with William Morris and W.E. Henley, and he was a cofounder of the Rhymers’ Club, whose members included his friends Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons. In 1889 Yeats met Maud Gonne, an Irish beauty, ardent and brilliant. From that moment, as he wrote, “the troubling of my life began.” He fell in love with her, but his love was hopeless. Maud Gonne liked and admired him, but she was not in love with him. When Yeats joined the Irish nationalist cause, he did so partly from conviction, but mostly for love of Maud. When Yeats’s play, Cathleen ni Houlihan was first performed in Dublin in 1902, she played the title role. It was during this period that Yeats came under the influence of John O’Leary, a charismatic leader of the Fenians, a secret society of Irish …show more content…
Pound was then editing translations of the “no” plays of Japan, and Yeats was greatly excited by them. The “no” drama provided a framework of emotion designed for a small audience capable of fully using the resources offered by masks, mime, dance, and song. Yeats devised what he considered an equivalent of the “no” drama in such plays as Four Plays for Dancers(1921), At the Hawk’s Well (first performed 1916), and several