William butler yeats brief biography of prophet adam
He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Though Yeats never learned Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore.
Adam's Curse study guide contains a biography of William Butler Yeats, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in , a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in and grew apart from Yeats and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees , she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.
Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, T. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms.
William Butler Yeats was an iconic Irish poet, dramatist, and writer, considered one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century.
He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in , he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin , and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century.
Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in and died in at the age of seventy-three.