W.B. Yeats (1865–1939)

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin and grew up between Ireland and England. He did not fit well in either place. Ireland was fighting for its life. England did not take the fight seriously.

He studied the old Irish myths. He believed in ghosts. He fell in love with a woman named Maud Gonne who would not love him back. He wrote poems about all of it.

His early poems are soft and dreamlike. His later poems are hard. They have stark images: a gyre spinning apart, a rough beast walking toward a city, a terrible beauty. He learned that beauty could hold something relentless inside it without breaking.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1923. He spent part of it renovating a Norman tower in County Galway. He called it Thoor Ballylee. He wrote poems there about time and ruin.

His Nobel Lecture (1923), "The Irish Dramatic Movement", was given the year after Irish independence. Yeats said he wrote it down afterwards, from memory. Read it at NobelPrize.org.