94 Biography
William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Dublin, Ireland. His father, John, was a lawyer, but an artist at heart, and he left his law practice to become a portrait painter. His mother was Susan Pollexfen, whose family had prosperous business interests in milling and shipbuilding in Sligo, on Ireland’s northwest coast.
In search of commissions, Yeats’s father moved the family to London, which set a pattern for the rest of Yeats’s life as he would move regularly between Dublin to London, summering in Sligo when he was a child, and at his friend Lady Gregory’s estate Coole Park when he was an adult, rarely settling in one place for long, even after he married and raised a family.
Yeats attended high schools in both London and Dublin. College was two years—1883 to 1885—at Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art (now the prestigious National College of Art and Design), an obvious choice for a young man from one of Ireland’s famously artistic families: his brother Jack would become a renowned painter; one of his sisters was an art teacher; and the other an accomplished designer, a protégé of the great William Morris, in whose studio she worked.
But Yeats soon recognized that poetry was his true calling. He established himself as a man of letters, and, for the next 50-plus years of his life, he worked tirelessly as a poet, playwright, and literary critic. Three themes dominate his work: his determination to use his gift in the interest of revitalizing Irish culture, his personal search for a spiritual identity, and his unrequited love for Maud Gonne.
Maud was the daughter of a British army officer but, raised in Ireland, she adopted the cause of Irish independence and became a leading spokesperson for the movement. From the day they met in 1889, she and Yeats were lifelong friends. She attended meetings of the mystical occult societies Yeats was always drawn to, and he attended her political rallies. A trained and gifted actress, she took the lead in his 1902 play Kathleen ni Houlihan. She broke his heart at least twice, first when she confessed to him that her two children (a son, Georges, who died as an infant, and a daughter, Iseult) were not, as she had claimed, adopted, but her natural children with a Paris journalist, married and much older than she. Some years later, she married John McBride, a major in the Irish Republican Army. Even after Yeats married in 1921 and had his own family, he references in his poetry his unrequited love for Maud. Among the poems we anthologize here, Maud appears in “No Second Troy,” “Easter 1916,” and “A Prayer for My Daughter.”
“The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Byzantium” touch on Yeats’s interest in discovering and promoting a system of spiritual enlightenment, which would explain the cycles of history, death and reincarnation, and the relationship of the mind and body to the spirit. For much of his life, Yeats was drawn to and took an