YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER (1865-1939), Irish author was born at Sandymount near Dublin on the 13th of June 1865. His father J. B. Yeats was a distinguished Irish artist and mem ber of the Royal Hibernian Academy, his mother's family was from County Sligo. Soon after his birth his parents moved to London but his early years were largely spent in Sligo and even when, at the age of nine or ten, he went to school in London he returned to Sligo for his holidays and his early work is full of allusions to its mountains and little lakes, indeed this beautiful county has coloured all his writing. He studied painting for a short time but at the age of twenty-four published his first book of poems The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and from that time f or ward gave his whole attention to literature. He was now living in London and a member of the group of young writers whose work appeared in The Yellow Book. A friend of William Morris and W. E. Henley and a frequent contributor to The National Ob server, he was one of the founders of the Rhymer's Club and a close friend to Arthur Symons and Lionel Johnson. Years later he published two books, Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1915) and The Trembling of the Veil (1922)—now brought together in the volume called Autobiographies—and in these will be found the history, fascinatingly told, of the first thirty years of his life. In 1892 his first poetic play The Countess Cathleen was published; it was followed two years later by another play The Land of Heart's Desire and in the previous year appeared his first volume of essays The Celtic Twilight. With Edwin J. Ellis he edited the Works of William Blake (1893) and also edited A Book of Irish Verse (1895). Three books of prose appeared in 1897: The Secret Rose, The Tables of the Law and The Adoration of the Magi; the last two were published privately but subsequently appeared publicly.
By 1897 he had become interested in the formation of an Irish theatre and with the help of Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and other friends the first performance of the Irish Literary Theatre took place in Dublin in 1899. This Theatre gradually developed, attracting to itself writers such as Mr. George Moore and "A.E."
and creating new writers such as J. M. Synge and Mr. Padraic Colum and by 1904 had established itself in the Abbey Theatre of which theatre Yeats was a Director until his death and contributed to its repertory many noble plays in verse and prose.
Side by side with playwriting went the writing of lyrics and the rewriting of much of his early work—for he had always been his own harshest critic. After 1897 his most noteworthy volumes of poems are The Wind among the Reeds (1899), Responsibilities (1914), The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Later Poems (1922) and The Tower (1927). His literary and critical essays are of impor tance, they are to be found in the volumes Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), The Cutting of an Agate (1912), Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (1918) and a number of witty and profound essays on the art of the theatre now collected into the volume Plays and Con troversies (1923). The private publication of a philosophic book A Vision (1925) must be noted. Owing to his habit of rewriting, versions of his work are many and various and the Collected Edi tion in eight volumes published in 1908 has long ago been super seded. The volumes at present published by Macmillan & Co. are practically a collected edition of the work which he wished to preserve, but in the opinion of many he had discarded or grievously altered many beautiful early poems. His first three plays in prose Kathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The Pot of Broth (1902) and The Hour Glass (1903) are entirely successful stage plays. It is diffi cult to speak with certainty of the stage success of his verse plays because, owing to the absence of a verse-theatre in England, the number of performances of them has not been large. He hoped in starting the Irish Literary Theatre to found amongst other things a verse-theatre in Ireland and during its early years a number of his verse plays were performed there but later the dramatic genius of Ireland emphatically declared itself to be realistic and not poetic and his dream of a verse-theatre had to be abandoned.