Inspirational Quotations by William Butler Yeats (Irish Poet)

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist respected by many the greatest poet of the 20th century. He won the 1923 Nobel Prize for literature and was the leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance.

Born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish family, Yeats studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where with his fellow student the Irish writer George William Russell, he developed an interest in mystical religion and the supernatural. At 21, he abandoned art in favor of literature, wrote novels, and edited poems.

Yeats founded the Irish Literary Society in London in 1891 and another in Dublin in 1892. He then applied himself to the creation of an Irish national theatre. In London, Yeats met the great, unrequited love of his life, the nationalist-activist Maud Gonne. He wrote several plays for her, like The Countess Kathleen (1892) and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902,) in which Gonne played the title character who personified Ireland and became a rallying figure in the Irish independence movement.

Some of Yeats’s most famous poems are “Easter, 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Yeats’s poems simultaneously dramatize and ironize the allure of escape from the burdens of modern living. Other famous poems explored his hopeless love for Gonne.

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