Biography Essay

William Butler Yeats, probably the twentieth century's greatest poet in English and certainly one of its most complex men, was born in the Dublin suburb of Sandymount on 13 June 1865. He was the eldest of the four surviving children, all brilliant, of a brilliant and problematical father, the painter-philosopher John Butler Yeats, and his muted and problematical wife, Susan Pollexfen Yeats. It was John Butler Yeats who spoke what his son called in his autobiography "the only eulogy that ever turned my head": "by marriage with a Pollexfen, we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs." W. B. Yeats's impassioned mystique of lineage, of name and place and history, is found at its most concentrated in the dedicatory lines beginning "Pardon, old fathers . . . " of his 1914 volume Responsibilities. There Yeats phrased his grief and shame over the case that a "barren passion," his long hopeless pursuit of...