William Butler Yeats Essay Research Paper William

William Butler Yeats Essay, Research Paper

William Butler Yeats is best known for his large contribution to the Irish Literary Renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, his writing alone would have been unique enough to start a literary renaissance even if he had not been joined by fellow authors Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Edwin Ellis, and many others. Yeats began writing because he was inspired by the culture and history of Ireland. As a child, Yeats moved often and later in life, he travelled constantly throughout Europe and to America. His early writings, based on Celtic myths and beliefs offered to him the foundation of his own culture which had survived for thousands of years, thus allowing him to be rooted in his homeland no matter where he travelled. Yeats style of poetry, especially, is obviously written to be different from any other author s and is meant to touch a part of the mind that has never before been reached by verse or prose. His approach to poetry was definitely new to the world of literature and perhaps caused the uniqueness in his writing. Yeats, through his literary works, redefined the boundaries that had limited earlier writers and presented possibilities which had not previously been considered in writing poetry. He grasped a better understanding of where poetry should originate: We should write out our thoughts, he said, in as nearly as possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend. .

The life of William Butler Yeats was affected the most by the three things he loved best: Ireland, his intimate friend Maud Gonne, and literature. Yeats is born on June 13, 1865 in Dublin. His parents are John Butler Yeats, an artist, and Susan Polexfen. At the age of two, Yeats and his family move to London where his brother Jack and sisters Elizabeth and Susan are born. Yeats moves to Hammersmith, England at the age of twelve and begins writing poetry in the 1880 s before moving back to Dublin in 1881, where he attended Erasmus Smith High School. The following year, Yeats moves to Islandview and falls in love with his distant cousin Laura Armstrong, with whom he has a short-lived romance due to her lack of interest in him. Yeats needs to leave Islandview and Laura behind after being rejected, thus he enrolls in the School of Art in Dublin at the age of nineteen. The following year, his first poems ware published in the Dublin University review and he joins literary clubs in his area.

In 1886, Yeats begins to immerse himself in the folk tales of Ireland, researching Gaelic legends and beginning to write about Ireland and its history. At this time, the Irish Literary Renaissance is beginning and Yeats, along with other Irish writers begins writing not only about Ireland, but his works are also directed toward an Irish audience. When Yeats is twenty-two, his mother suffers two strokes during a period of illness and Yeats moves with his family to London. He then joins the literary circle at the Kelmscott House of William Morris. This begins a period in Yeats writing in which he is greatly influenced by the literary works of Shelley and Spenser (Jeffares, xiii). In 1888, Yeats publishes some of his writings in American journals, and for the first time, he becomes known outside of Great Britain. He works as an editor, reviewer, and critic in the Bodleian, a publication at Oxford. The following year, Yeats publishes Crossways , his first book of poetry and later in the year, The Wanderings of Oisin , which includes more poems. He meets Oscar Wilde, Edwin Ellis, with whom he collaborates in writing Fairy and Folk Tales that year, and Maud Gonne, to whom he is immediately attracted. However, she is an Irish revolutionary and remains uninterested in his quiet, literary nature. He is thus influenced to become involved in the Irish Revolutionary Movement in order to catch the eye of his new found love.

In 1891, Yeats founds the National Literary Society at Dublin and the following year, he writes his first play, The Countess Cathleen for Maud Gonne, hoping that she will someday play the female lead. He also publishes another volume of Irish fairy tales. At the age of twenty-eight, he begins editing the Celtic Twilight and along with Ellis, edits The Works of William Blake . Yeats then publishes The Rose , another collection of poems. Soon after, he visits Paris for the first of many times and writes The Land of Heart s Desire . In 1896, he has an affair with fellow writer Olivia Shakespeare, but soon returns to the love of his life, Maud Gonne. In another attempt to impress her, Yeats joins the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a revolutionary organization that Yeats himself has little interest in. He then meets many of the other main contributors to the Irish Literary Renaissance, including Lady Gregory and J. M Synge.

Yeats spends the following summer with his new friends at Coole, the estate of Lady Gregory and begins writing his only novel, The Speckled Bird, which is never published. In 1898, he goes on a tour of England and Scotland with Maud, who then rejects his proposal of marriage, and he soon goes again to Paris. Wind Among the Reeds is published, which is the first of Yeats poetry that sways from his early style and is obviously influenced by his study of Celtic culture. The Countess Cathleen is first performed in Dublin and receives negative reviews. In 1900, Yeats mo