by Jennie Mc Donald

Created on: February 10, 2009

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin on the 13th of June 1865, he was the son of John Butler Yeats a barrister turned artist and Susan Pollexfen, daughter of a wealthy Sligo family. Yeats' early years were spent between Dublin, London and Sligo. His earlier schooling was divided between London and Dublin, and he later entered the Metropolitan School of Art, as his academic grades were not sufficient to gain him entry to other schools at the time. However, due to the influence of the works of poets such as James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson, Yeats was drawn away from the arts and largely towards writing. Yeats had five main themes which ran throughout his poetry, Irish nationalism, Celtic mythology, love, mysticism and ageing. However, many critics note that most if not all of his poetry contained differing degrees of mysticism. Yeats is himself quoted to have said, The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write'. Yeats' interest in the mystical may have developed through his mother, as is mother's family, the Pollexfens, were known for their eccentricities, and said to possess a great interest in astrology and magic. Yeats is known to have experimented with telepathy and clairvoyance with his uncle George Pollexfen from a relatively early age. Later, at the age of twenty, Yeats was among the founders of a group devoted to the occult, known as the Dublin Hermetic Society and when the family moved to London, he joined a famous mystical society called the Theosophical Society. As a visionary, Yeats was truly interested in surrounding himself with images, those which he could incorporate into his poetry.

Yeats married Georgie Hyde Lees in 1917, and through her cooperation as a medium he published A Vision in 1925. They had two children, Anne and Michael. Yeats was known to sing his proofs and his wife Georgie once wrote, he often forgot to consider whether song and printed word corresponded'. The importance that he himself set by rhythm was considerable, as he shows in the essay The Symbolism of Poetry' (1900). the purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols'.

It is often said that

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