William Butler Yeats 1865 - 1939
  
William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin of Protestant parents. He was educated in Dublin and London, but spent much of his boyhood with his maternal grandparents in Sligo, where the breathtaking scenery, legends and folklore had a major influence on his life and work.

Not being one of the Roman Catholic majority and rejecting the materialist values of the dominant Protestant minority, Yeats, from his earliest writings turned to pre-Christian pagan Ireland for his inspiration. He was very interested in esoteric mysticism, founding a society in Dublin to study Hinduism and Asian religions. Back in London in 1887, he studied the prophetic books of William Blake, drawing an early connection between poetry and the occult. A close interest in the magical and apocalyptic remained central to him throughout his life.

Yeats's earlier poems, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Rose (1893), celebrate the Irish landscape of his boyhood and explore pagan Irish themes.

The lyrical, nostalgic beauty of these poems is exemplified in The Lake Isle of Innisfree, which came into the poet's mind as he walked in a London street. Then, in 1889, he met the beautiful, passionate Irish nationalist Maude Gonne while visiting Ireland, and she not only inspired much of his early work but also drew him into the Irish independence movement.

However, Yeats's love was unrequited because he could not share Maude Gonne's fiercely activist views after the failure and death of the charismatic Irish leader Charles Parnell in 1891. Instead, he turned to evocations of ancient Celtic beauty, heroism and mystery, present in the almost vanished Gaelic language of old Ireland.

In 1898, he met the nationalist playwright and mythographer, Lady Augusta Gregory, and thereafter spent his summers at her home at Coole Park, Co. Galway. In 1899, the Irish Literary Theatre, which he had co-founded with Lady Gregory, performed his The Countess Cathleen as its first venture. Yeats remained for the rest of his life a director of the organisation, which became the famous Abbey Theatre in 1904, pioneering the so-called Irish Renaissance.

From 1909 onwards, Yeats began to discard the mistily evocative tone of his earlier work for a language that was harder and more physical. In Responsibilities (1914), a new directness emerges in his work, confronting reality and its imperfections. With The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Yeats achieved a renewal of inspiration and a perfecting of technique that gave his work a new rigour, beauty and economy. Many critics regard this achievement as almost without parallel in the history of English language poetry.

In 1917, Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who claimed to have a medium's gift for automatic writing. Her spiritualism had an important influence on his work, notably in the cyclical patterns of cosmic forces he called Gyres. These ideas recur in many of his finest poems, such as The Second Coming (1922). In 1922, following Irish independence, Yeats became a member of the new Irish Senate and in 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued writing into old age, dying in Roquebrune, France, in 1939. In 1948, his body was brought back to Ireland and laid to rest in his beloved Sligo.
 

William Butler Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism, astrology and numerology. He read extensively on the subjects throughout his life, and was especially influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. As early as 1892, he wrote:
"If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."
His mystical interests—also inspired by a study of Hinduism, under the Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, and the occult—formed much of the basis of his late poetry. However, some critics have dismissed these influences as lacking in intellectual credibility. In particular, W. H. Auden criticized this aspect of Yeats' work as the "deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India."

Yeats's first significant poem was "The Isle of Statues" a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser for its poetic model. The piece appeared in Dublin University Review, but has not since been republished. His first solo publication was the pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), which comprised a print run of 100 copies paid for by his father. This was followed by the collection The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), which arranged a series of verse that dated as far back as the mid-1880s. The long titular poem contains, in the words of his biographer R.F. Foster, "obscure Gaelic names, striking repetitions [and] an unremitting rhythm subtly varied as the poem proceeded through its three sections".

"The Wanderings of Oisin" is based on the lyrics of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology, and displays the influence on Yeats of both Sir Samuel Ferguson and the Pre-Raphaelite poets. The poem took two years to complete, and was one of the few works from this period that he did not disown in his maturity. Oisin introduces what was to become one of his most important themes; the appeal of the life of contemplation over the appeal of the life of action. Following the work, Yeats never again attempted another long poem. His other early poems are meditations on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects, and include Poems (1895), The Secret Rose (1897), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).

In June 1885, Yeats was involved in the formation of the Dublin Hermetic Order with Yeats acting as its chairman. Later that year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge was opened in conjunction with Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee, who traveled from the London Theosophical Society to lecture. Yeats attended his first séance the following year. He later became heavily involved with the Theosophical Society, and with hermeticism, in particular the eclectic Rosicrucianism of the Golden Dawn. During séances held from 1912, a spirit calling itself "Leo Africanus" apparently claimed to be Yeats's Daemon or anti-self, inspiring some of the speculations in Per Amica Silentia Lunae. He was admitted into the Golden Dawn in March 1890, and took the magical motto Daemon est Deus inversus—translated as Devil is God inverted or A demon is a god reflected. He was an active recruiter for the sect's Isis-Urania temple, and brought in his uncle George Pollexfen, Maud Gonne, and Florence Farr. Although he reserved a distaste for abstract and dogmatic religions founded around personality cults, he was attracted to the type of people he met at the Golden Dawn. He was involved in the Order's power struggles, both with Farr and Macgregor Mathers, most notably when Mathers sent Aleister Crowley to repossess Golden Dawn paraphernalia during the "Battle of Blythe Road." After the Golden Dawn ceased and splintered into various offshoots, Yeats remained with the Stella Matutina until 1921.

However, Yeats poem, "The Statues", indicates best his great interest in Numerology.