W.B. Yeats -Master of traditional verse forms

Compiled by Ishara Mudugamuwa

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865. He was the son of a well known painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen. Yeats family moved to London when he was two and he lived there until he was sixteen.

The Butler Yeats family were highly artistic. His brother Jack went on to become a highly regarded painter, while his sister Elizabeth and her friends Lollie and Lily became involved in the arts and crafts movement.

Yeats studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Soon after undertaking his studies, however Yeats decided it was poetry and not painting that most interested him. His first collection of poetry being published in 1889.
The Wanderings of Oslin and other poems already showed concerns that were to remain central to his writing-Ireland, spiritualism and love. His earliest book drew on the romantics and pre-Raphaelite ideals and methologies. Yeats married Georgie Hyde Lees with whom he lead a very happy life.

W.B. Yeats generally considered to be one of the twentieth century's key English language poets. He can be considered a symbolist poet in that he used allusive imagery and symbolic structure throughout his career.

Yeats chooses words and puts them together so that in addition to a particular meaning they suggest other meanings that seen more significant. His use of symbols is usually something physical which is used both to be itself and to suggest other.

Yeats was a master of the traditional verse forms. The impact of modernism in his work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favor of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that icreasingly characterrises the poetry and plays of his middle period, comparing the values In The Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet.

His later poetry and plays are written in more personal vein, and the works written in the last twenty years of his life include mention of his son and daughter.

Yeats' adult life is often devided in to three periods. The first was passed in London where he belonged to a group of fun de sieclepoets. His second period of his life was after returning to Ireland in 1896. In the cent of the conflict was the love of his life Maud Gonne.

It is at this point in his life that his plays and poems, though beautiful, began to repeat themselves. Yeats' young life would soon to be drastically changed, as he would meet Gregory. They founded the Irish Literary Theater, whih would become the Abbey Theater and the Irish academy. Yeats wrote several plays for the Abbey Theater.

The third stage of his life was a diverse one. In 1922 he became a member of the Irish Senate. In 1923 Yeats would win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He was the only poet in history whose last work was his best. The formost figures of the 20th century literature, W.B. Yeats died in France in 1939 and was buried in Drumcliffe Church, Co. Silgo as he had requeste.