Facts about W.B. Yeats
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Yeats's 1889 collection The Wanderings of Oisin established his reputation as a major poet through its 3,400-line narrative poem blending Irish mythology with romantic symbolism.
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Yeats's 1896 collection The Secret Rose contained 15 stories blending Irish folklore with esoteric symbolism drawn from his occult studies.
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Yeats spent his final years in southern France and Sicily, dying in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on January 28, 1939, before his body was repatriated to Ireland in 1948.
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Yeats's romantic obsession with Irish nationalist Maud Gonne lasted nearly thirty years, inspiring some of his finest love poetry despite her repeated rejections and 1903 marriage to another man.
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Yeats's 1923 collection The Tower established him as a modernist master at age 57, containing some of his most celebrated poems including Sailing to Byzantium and Leda and the Swan.
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Yeats's marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917 produced his most productive creative period, during which his wife's automatic writing sessions inspired the philosophical system published in A Vision.
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Yeats's 1904 play Cathleen ni Houlihan, co-written with Lady Gregory, became a cornerstone of Irish nationalist theatre and allegedly inspired armed rebellion.
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During his later years, Yeats developed a controversial interest in eugenics and corresponded with scholars advocating selective breeding theories in the 1930s.
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Yeats's 1889 novel John Sherman marked his first published work of fiction, preceding his emergence as a major poet by several years.
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Yeats's obsessive interest in the occult led him to join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890, where he studied magic and mysticism for decades.
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The Irish literary figure W.B. Yeats served as a senator in the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928, representing Trinity College Dublin.
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In 1923, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature at age 57 for his contributions to poetry and drama.