Lambirth, Andrew : W B Yeats - A Biography with selected Poems

A Biography and selected Poems by Andrew Lambirth.

WB Yeats (1865-1939) is Ireland's finest poet. In a period when Irish writers, like Wilde, Shaw and Joyce, tended to leave the home country and adopt a more English or European life, Yeats was a passionate nationalist. He was born in Dublin, and although he travelled abroad and spent several years in London, he always returned to his native city, and to the Irish countryside - in particular Sligo and Galway. One of his greatest achievements was the creation of an Irish national theatre, which enjoyed great success at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Yeats was also a Senator of the Irish Free State from 1922 until 1928, and in 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. To match his nationalism was a firm belief in mysticism and the irrational. His life-long investigation of the occult fuelled his poetry, as did his detailed knowledge of Irish folk-lore. His early poems were influenced by symbolism and the Pre-Raphaelites and he counted William Morris among his friends. In later life, and particularly after his marriage in 1917, Yeats brought a greater colloquial realism and personal emotion to his work. His last years were enlivened by the effects of a 'Monkey Gland' rejuvenating operation, but if his personal life became hectic, he nevertheless wrote then some of his greatest poetry. WB Yeats excelled at prose and drama as well as verse, but is best known today as a lyric poet of the highest order, adept at the sort of verbal magic that lives on intensely in the mind.