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William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Anglo-Irish poet and dramatist. Though he was born in Dublin and maintained a lifelong fascination with Irish history and folklore, Yeats spent several significant stretches of his youth and young adulthood in London. His earliest poetry, with its lush language, reflected the influence of the British Romantic poets. But after the turn of the century, Yeats’s writing underwent several transformations, often in tandem with his shifting relation to Ireland. As he became more personally invested in Irish nationalism in the 1900s, his poetry took on a simpler, more popular style. In the early 1910s, however, he felt increasingly at odds with Ireland’s Catholic middle class, and he left for England. Only with the Easter Rising of 1916 did he warm again to Ireland and return. Around this time, Yeats’s longstanding interest in mysticism began to influence his creative output. From the late 1910s to the early 1930s, he produced a new type of poetry rife with metaphysical symbolism. Yet in all his work, Yeats maintained firmly committed to craft. Whether political or metaphysical, his poetry astonishes for its masterful attention to rhythm, cadence, form, and style. His achievement earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

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