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- Yeats, W(illiam) (B)utler 1865-1939. Irish
- poet. He was a leader of the Celtic revival
- and a founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
- His early work was romantic and lyrical, as
- in the poem `The Lake Isle of Innisfree' and
- plays The Countess Cathleen 1892 and The Land
- of Heart's Desire 1894. His later books of
- poetry include The Wild Swans at Coole 1917
- and The Winding Stair 1929. He was a senator
- of the Irish Free State 1922-28. Nobel prize
- 1923. Yeats was born in Dublin. His early
- poetry, such as The Wind Among the Reeds
- 1899, is romantically and exotically lyrical,
- and he drew on Irish legend for his poetic
- plays, including Deirdre 1907, but broke
- through to a new sharply resilient style with
- Responsibilities 1914. In his personal life
- there was also a break: the beautiful Maude
- Gonne, to whom many of his poems had been
- addressed, refused to marry him, and in 1917
- he married Georgie Hyde-Lees, whose work as a
- medium reinforced his leanings towards mystic
- symbolism, as in the prose work A Vision 1925
- and 1937. His later volumes of verse include
- The Tower 1928 and Last Poems and Two Plays
- 1939. His other prose works include
- Autobiographies 1926, Dramatis Personae 1936,
- Letters 1954, and My Theologies 1959.
-