Yeats Influences

William Butler Yeats was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century; his works were inspiring and embraced a culture lost with the changing of times in Ireland. Yeats was born in the spring of 1865, to John Butler Yates and Susan Mary Pollexfen, during the time of the protestant ascendancy in Ireland; he was the oldest one of his three siblings. His father John, dissatisfied with his current standings, dropped out from law school to pursue a career as a painter and became a well known artist. His mother was born of a wealthy merchant family, and herself pursued no occupation; but despite all this, his family still struggled financially for most of Yeats’ adolescent years. At the age of two, he and his family moved out of Ireland to London; Yeats however, still spent most of his childhood growing up in Sligo, Ireland with his grandparents, where he began to develop a strong sense of national pride and adopted a strong attachment to life and culture in Ireland.
His father, being a well know artist, exposed Yeats to a variety of art; painting, and poetry were the main subjects that impacted him, especially during his younger years. He soon became interested in poetry and began writing his own at the age of fifteen. Despite his many talents, he did have a natural gift for painting and began to stumble with more advanced work; he started to struggle with his schooling, and by nineteen, he had completely stopped all of his formal education. Soon after, he moved back to Ireland so that he could focus his artistic efforts solely on his poetic writing. He published …show more content…
She was half his age at twenty-five years, and married him when he was fifty-one. Despite being a great poet, he was a poor husband and was repeatedly unfaithful to his wife; despite this, they raised their two children, Anne and Michael, and remained married until the end of his