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Home · British & Irish Literature · W.B. Yeats
Poet · Dramatist

W.B. Yeats

1865–1939 · Dublin, Ireland

The poet who remade himself from Celtic dreamer into the hardest modern voice in English.

Nobel Prize 1923 · Irish Revival

Life & Background

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865 into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family, the son of the painter John Butler Yeats, and divided his childhood between London and Sligo, the western landscape that fills his early work. He was deeply involved in occultism, joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and in Irish cultural nationalism, co-founding the Abbey Theatre in 1904 with Lady Gregory. He loved Maud Gonne, the revolutionary nationalist, proposed repeatedly, and was refused; the rejection runs through decades of his poetry. He married Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917, whose automatic writing supplied the symbolic system of A Vision. He served as a senator in the Irish Free State and won the Nobel Prize in 1923, continuing to write his strongest poetry into his seventies.

The Second Coming

The Second Coming
1919, published 1920
Plot summary

The poem opens with a falcon spiralling outward in a widening gyre, no longer able to hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and anarchy is loosed on the world; the best lack conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The speaker takes this as a sign that a revelation is at hand, and an image out of the world-soul comes to him: somewhere in the desert sands a shape with a lion's body and the head of a man, its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs while indignant desert birds wheel around it. The darkness drops again, and the speaker asks what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Literary analysis

The poem draws on Yeats's private historical system from A Vision, in which history moves through two-thousand-year cycles represented by interlocking gyres, each age producing its opposite; the Christian era is ending and its antithesis is arriving. Written in the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Irish struggle, it converts that scheme into public prophecy without explaining it, which is why the poem works for readers who know nothing of the system. Its language is deliberately bare — monosyllables, declarative sentences — and the sphinx image is left unexplained, so that the poem's authority comes from withholding rather than from argument.

Why Yeats Matters

Yeats is unusual in having produced major work in three distinct manners — the Celtic Twilight lyricism of the 1890s, the hardened public poetry after 1910, and the late poems of age and rage — which makes him a case study in poetic development. He built the institutional foundations of modern Irish literature through the Abbey Theatre and the Revival, and Easter 1916 remains the central English-language poem about political violence and its commemoration. His symbolism, his gyres, and his relationship to modernism and to nationalism are all standard examination topics.

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Key Facts

Nobel Prize 1923
He was the first Irish writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Founded the Abbey Theatre
With Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn he established Ireland's national theatre in 1904.
A Vision
His occult system of gyres and lunar phases, developed from his wife's automatic writing, underlies much of the late poetry.
Maud Gonne
She refused his proposals repeatedly across decades and remains the presiding figure of his love poetry.

All Major Works

  • The Wanderings of Oisin1889
  • The Lake Isle of Innisfree1890
  • Cathleen ni Houlihan1902
  • Easter 19161916
  • The Wild Swans at Coole1919
  • The Second Coming1920
  • Sailing to Byzantium1928
  • The Tower1928
  • Last Poems1939
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