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Understanding the poetry of William Butler Yeats

Desire (1894) and The King's Threshold (1904). By this time, Yeats had already made a name for himself on the English literary scene, with The Lake Isle of Innisfree already published in 1892.

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Yeats went on a series of lecture tours to the United States, and started the Cuala Press in 1904, which printed names like Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bowen, Rabindranath Tagore and so on. Meanwhile his own writing career was flourishing, The Celtic Twilight and The Rose came out in 1893, The Land of Heart's Desire was published in 1894, and the collection The Wind Among the Reeds in 1899.

Other remarkable works of this period include Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) which has the famous poems The Second Coming, and A Prayer For My Daughter. These were written after his marriage in 1917 to Georgie (George) Hyde Lees (1892-1968) with whom he had two children. This marriage increased his interest in the occult and the spirit, and this interest percolated into the poetry of the later period of his poetic career.

The last period of Yeats's poetry is universally acclaimed to be his deepest, as well as the most spiritually oriented. In 1917 Yeats bought the Norman tower Thoor Ballylee' near Coole Park in Galway; and The Wild Swans at Coole was published in 1919. In 1922, when civil war broke out in Ireland, Yeats received an Honorary degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and was elected to the Irish senate where he served for six years.

During this time Yeats continued to work and published some of his better known works like The Cat and the Moon (1924), A Vision (1925) , and also The Tower (1928) which includes several of his most acclaimed poems like Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, and Among School Children. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his inspired poetry, "which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation".

Yeats has often been criticized for his style of writing, George Orwell thought Yeats had a "tortured style of writing", and a "rather sinister vision of life" and finds in Yeats's work that "one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech". This is a sort of difficulty in reading Yeats that many readers often experience.

But in reading Yeats one has to take into account that he was "by birth and temperament, by the accidents of his upbringing and no less by deliberate and studied


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Understanding the poetry of William Butler Yeats

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    by Patricia Hughes

    (An Extract from "W. B. Yeats and the Murder of Honour Bright"

    by Patricia Hughes

    ISBN 0-9550978-2-7






    The Poetry of William

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  • 2 of 3

    by Damyanti Ghosh

    Some time back, I attended a wedding ceremony where the groom read W.B.Yeat's well-known poem "When You Are Old" to the bride,

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  • 3 of 3

    by Jennie Mc Donald

    William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin on the 13th of June 1865, he was the son of John Butler Yeats a barrister turned

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