William Butler Yeats.

The eldest child of painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen, who hailed from a prosperous Sligo family, William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 in Sandymount, County Dublin. The family moved to London when William was two, but he returned to Dublin in 1880 to attend the Erasmus Smith High School. He later studied at the National College of Art and Design, but his true passion was poetry. The landscape of County Sligo, where he spent many childhood holidays, deeply influenced his imagination.

Yeats’s first important poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree was published in 1890. He co-founded the Abbey Theatre in 1904 with Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge, producing plays that revitalised Irish drama. In 1923 he became the first Irish recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He continued writing poetry until his death, producing masterpieces like The Tower in 1928 and The Winding Stair in 1933. His plays remain performed worldwide.

Yeats married Georgiana Hyde-Lees on 21 October 1917; she was 26 years his junior. The couple had two children: Anne and Michael. Yeats had a lifelong interest in the occult and was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He allegedly declined a British knighthood in 1915 out of nationalist sentiments.

Yeats’s work reshaped 20th-century poetry and Irish identity. His poem Sailing to Byzantium inspired the title of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. The Cranberries referenced him in their song Yeat’s Grave. In 2015, Ireland issued a commemorative postage stamp for his 150th birthday. He is remembered as the greatest poet of the Irish Literary Revival and a master of modernist verse.