"We taste and feel and see the truth, we do not reason ourselves into it."

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

W B Yeats was born on 13 June 1865 in Dublin. He studied art from 1884-1886 at the Dublin Metropolitan School and took the chair of the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1885 initiating his life-long interest in the connection between literature and magic: “The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."

Yeats was also interested in folktales as part of an exploration into national heritage and a revival of Celtic identity. The Wanderings of Oisín and Other Poems (1889) took its subject from Irish mythology. His study of Irish legends and tales was published in 1888 under the name Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry and he assembled a version for children, Irish Fairy Tales, which appeared in 1892.

Yeats was greatly influenced by the Fenian leader, John O’Leary, in whom he discovered expression of 'a gracious nationalism'. In 1892, with O’Leary’s aid, he founded the National Literary Society. By this time his reputation had grown, he had fallen in love with Maud Gonne, and he was searching for an art form that gave expression to a deeper Irish identity than simply a nationalist one. In 1899 Yeats’ friend and patron, Lady Gregory, along with Edward Martyn and George Moore, established the Irish Literary Theatre for the purpose of performing Irish and Celtic plays. Yeats' most famous dramas performed there were Kathleen Ní Houlihan in 1902 (in which Maud Gonne gained great acclaim in the title role) and The Land of Heart’s Desire. He championed the production of The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge despite the controversy and riots which followed.

Yeats’ later work was engaged with more contemporary issues and his direct engagement with politics can be seen in the poem September 1913 - an attack on employers who were involved in the Dublin lockout of workers: "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, / It's with O'Leary in the grave." In Easter 1916, he refers to the executed leaders of the uprising: "Now and in time to be, / Wherever the green is worn, / All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born." Yeats developed continuously as a poet, adopting a sparer vocabulary and more precise images ultimately developing a unique style that was direct and simple and yet charged with meaning and emotion.

Yeats' love for Maud Gonne was long-lasting but unrequited; he proposed to her four times and she refused each proposal. In 1903, Maud Gonne married the Irish nationalist, John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary who was later executed by British forces for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees who was, like him, interested in occult matters - the couple went on to have two children, Anne and Michael.

In 1922 Yeats became a senator in the Irish Free State and in 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He founded the Irish Academy of Letters in 1932. In his final years he worked on A Vision in collaboration with his wife. He published The Oxford Book of Verse in 1936 and New Poems in 1938. Yeats died in 1939 at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Menton, France. His epitaph is taken from the last lines of Under Ben Bulben, one of his final poems:

“Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman; pass by!"