William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, but spent over half his life outside
Ireland. He studied painting at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art before
turning his full attention to literature. Central themes of his poetry are
Irish history, folklore, and contemporary politics. His early work belonged
the "Celtic revival" school and, in long allegorical poems and verse dramas,
showed the influence of Shakespeare, Blake, and Shelley. A major aspect of his
life was his love for the beautiful revolutionary Maud Gonne, whose politics
first excited, then, as they led to violence and betrayal, repulsed him.
Another abiding interest, in mysticism and the occult, provided a source of
poetic symbols, as well as a philosophical "key" to his writing, _A Vision_
(1925, 1937). Though he sought respite in his imagination and its artifices
and venerated the "immortal world" of the intellect and the soul, Yeats never
rejected the sensuous world of the mortal body. Exploring the tensions between
mortal and immortal, he raged against his diminishing physical powers in his
later years and grounded his poetry in "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the
heart." Perhaps his greatest achievement lay in his ability to create poems
of extraordinary lyricism or dramatic intensity from the idiom and syntax of
ordinary speech. He said that his estranging vision of extraordinary experience
evoked "monstrous familiar images" that "bewilder" and "perturbed the mind."
far from frozen by these images, the mind continued to explore, to question,
to explain.