W.B. Yeats: Irish Magic, Nobel Prizes, and Broken Hearts

William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, Dublin, into a family that often moved with the wind—or at least with the shifting aspirations of his father, John Butler Yeats, who left a legal career to pursue painting. The instability that followed led the family—including William, his mother Susan, and his siblings, Jack, Susan “Lily,” and Elizabeth “Lolly”—from Dublin to London and back again, punctuated by return visits to Sligo, where Yeats found a deep spiritual and imaginative home in the folklore-rich countryside of his mother’s people, the Pollexfens.
Although his formal education was patchy and hampered by dyslexia and tone-deafness, Yeats’s passion for Irish myth, the occult, and the written word took root early. After dabbling in art at the Metropolitan School in Dublin, he transitioned to full-time writing. He published his first poems in the Dublin University Review and soon became a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival. With friends like John Synge and Lady Gregory, he co-founded the Abbey Theatre in 1904, scripting a new voice for Irish identity on the stage.
A passionate spiritual seeker, Yeats joined the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. These mystical pursuits would deeply influence his poetry, plays, and especially his metaphysical tome A Vision, co-created through his wife George Hyde-Lees’ experiments in automatic writing. Speaking of George, she was not his first choice—Yeats famously proposed multiple times to revolutionary Maud Gonne, whose rejection fed some of his most poignant and politically charged verse.
The couple—Yeats and George—had two children, Anne and Michael, both of whom carried forward elements of their father’s creative and intellectual legacy. In 1923, Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature, a belated but fitting honor for a man who had made myth, magic, and Ireland sing on the world’s stage.
Yeats’s poetry has left an indelible mark on global literature, inspiring everyone from modernist poets to musicians and political thinkers. He saw aging as a romantic transformation and sorrow as a gift. Two lines that best show this are from When You Are Old: “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face.” And from The Stolen Child: “For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.” These words echo across time, still startlingly beautiful in a world that continues to seek meaning in mystery.