Discuss the life and works of W. B. Yeats.

Ans.

LIFE AND WORKS

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymouth near Dublin in 1865. He was the eldest son of his father, John Butler Yeats. The grandfather of the author. Butler Yeats was the Rector of the church of Ireland. This family probably migrated from England to Ireland in seventeenth century. This family was well educated in religious concerns and harsh discipline. The author toured London. Dublin and Sligo in his childhood with his parents. His father shifted his household many times between Dublin and London, and the children were often left with their maternal grand-parents at Sligo for financial reasons. W. B. Yeats passed many years in Sligo with his mother. His eye-sight was weak along with his physical health. People at Sligo were healthy and fair while the complexion of the author was not fair one. All this led the poet to aloofness. He was not sportive. He was not interested much in his study. His learning power too was very low. The author was inclined to live in the mountain-caves so that he may pass his life in day-dreams.

Yeats’s uncle and aunt regarded his as mentally deficient child. He was highly religious but he did not like to go to church even on Sundays. His early education was largely neglected. He loved Sligo for its natural beauty and hated London.

In the age of ten years he was sent to Godolphin School at Hammersmith. H is father taught him enough from the novels of Hannah More Cooper. Till 1880. Yeats learnt some Latin with History. He was weak in Mathematics. He was ridiculed by the fellow-boys saying him as Indian fo his dark complexion.

His father was interested in sending William to join Trinity College, Dublin but in place of this he was admitted in the Metropolitan School of Art to become a painter. Later he was admitted in Royal Hibernian Academy. Here he came in the close contact with George Russel. William’s manner of painting was Pre-Raphaelite. He became well known to Professor Dowden, Tynan, Dr. Hyde and John F. Taylor.

In the age of twenty three he came in the friendship with Maud Gonne a country girl who was from an aristocratic family. She wanted to earn the fame of a politician. She thought that the poet would not able to make her happy. From Paris she wrote a letter to the author informing that she had married with Major John MacBride. He was interested in doing everything for his beloved but he could not win her. He became a patient of consumption After three years. Maud Gonne got separation from her husband. Still the poet adored her and fell in love with Maud Gonne’s daughter too. After many years he, in 1917 married George Hyde-Lees who was a friend of the poet, Ezra Pound. He died on Jan. 28, 1939. His dead body was brought to Drumcliffe from France after the second world war.