13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939 By Niall Ó Cearbhaill

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1865 and died in He was a poet and dramatist and some of the poems he wrote are among the most well known poems in Ireland and around the world.

His father John was born in County Down. John was a portrait artist and had a belief that there was no God and that art was important for everything. His mother Susan Pollexfen born in County Sligo came from a very wealthy family who owned a milling and shipping business. He was the eldest of four children and all the children were very artistic. Jack his brother became a hugely known artist while his sisters Elizabeth and Susan Mary were interested in arts and crafts.

Yeats was fascinated by Irish folklore and that influenced his first book of poems The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems published in The poems were about Irish heroes Oisin, Finn, Aengus and St. Patrick. He also published many romantic and personal books of poems such as The Celtic Twilight in The Wind among the Reeds won the Royal Academy Prize as the best book of poems in 1899.

In September 1917 at the age of 51 Yeats proposed to a friend he had met a couple of years earlier called Georgie Hyde Lees. Although she was 25 years old and Yeats had proposed to a different women a few months before she said yes and they got married that October. They went on to have two children Ann and Michael.

In December 1923 Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He travelled to Stolkolm, Sweden to collect his award.

He died in Roquebrune, France, on January 28, 1929 at the age of 74. He had retired there a few years before because of ill health. He had the lines of one of his poems written on his gravestone in Drumcliff Churchyard, Sligo. Cast a cold eye, On life, on death. Horseman, pass by