by William Butler Yeats

Often considered the foremost poet of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats was born in 1865 in Sandymount, Ireland, a district on the outskirts of Dublin. Yeats’s childhood was spent between London and Dublin—the cities in which his father sought to earn a living as an artist—and the Irish countryside of Sligo, where he spent vacations with his extended family, soaking in the folklore and legends that would permeate much of his early poetry. While enrolled in Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art, Yeats met the budding mystic, George Russell, and the Irish nationalist, John O’Leary, who became his much-admired mentor. Through O’Leary’s introduction in 1889, Yeats met and fell in love with Maud Gonne, a fiery Irish nationalist and feminist, who became the muse that would inspire...