Sligo, London and the stage
Born in Dublin in 1865, Yeats grew up between Ireland and England. His father John Butler Yeats was a painter, and his mother’s Pollexfen family connected him to Sligo. Folktales, place names and the landscape of the west of Ireland supplied him with settings and voices even when he was living in London.
With Lady Gregory and other collaborators he helped establish the theatre movement that found a home at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1904. Public life later took him into the Senate, and in 1923 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The passage from early lyrics to later poems about revolution and age unfolded alongside those institutional commitments.
Two writers at a table
After his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917, the couple began sessions of automatic writing. He posed questions and she produced written replies that they understood as communications. Their notebooks show questions, diagrams and revisions accumulating over years. Yeats drew on them for A Vision, whose first version bears the date 1925. Its account of historical cycles and human character took shape through this exchange well before he arranged it into a book under his own name.
