It’s the birthday of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and someone who, more than 75 years after his death, “still towers among the giants of world literature” (see article here).

I know what you’re thinking: is Yeats Yeats, or is Yeats Keats? Here’s a handy guide to telling the difference:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yeats-with-a-Y was born in Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland, to Protestant parents but came to identify with neither Protestants nor Catholics, preferring Ireland’s ancient history of paganism and, eventually, occultism and spiritualism. Yeats’ family moved to London when he was two but returned to Dublin in 1880, where he went to high school and then the Metropolitan School of Art. He began publishing his poetry in college and went on to publish many collections and some nationalistic Irish plays as well; he was active in running the Abbey Theatre company for many years. But Yeats was unusual in that he produced his greatest poetry after the age of 50.

In 1889 Yeats famously fell in love with Maud Gonne, who did not return his passion because she was already in love with Ireland. (That had to be complicated.) He proposed to her anyway in 1891 and again in 1899, 1900, 1901, and 1916 (by which time she’d married and separated from someone else), after which Yeats—now 51 years old—finally gave up and asked Maud’s daughter to marry him, and when she also turned him down (fair enough), he instead married the 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees, with whom he had two children.

In 1922, Yeats joined the new Irish Senate, serving for six years, and in 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His last two collections were New Poems (1938) and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939); having used up all his brilliance on the poems themselves, he had little inspiration left for snappy titles. He died while traveling in France in 1939 at nearly 74 years of age, and his body was returned to Sligo, Ireland, after the war in 1948. He was buried there under an epitaph he wrote himself: “Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by!”

Yeats’ poem “Death,” in its entirety, runs:

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

Man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

Many times he died,

Many times rose again.

A great man in his pride

Confronting murderous men

Casts derision upon

Supersession of breath;

He knows death to the bone—

Man has created death.

Have a fine Thursday, consider picking up The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats at your favorite local bookstore, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.