William Butler Yeats is best known for his large contribution to the Irish Literary Renaissance of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, his writing alone would have been unique enough to start a literary renaissance even if he had not been joined by fellow authors Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Edwin Ellis, and many others. Yeats began writing because he was inspired by the culture and history of Ireland. As a child, Yeats moved often and later in life, he travelled constantly throughout Europe and to America. His early writings, based on Celtic myths and beliefs offered to him the foundation of his own culture which had survived for thousands of years, thus allowing him to be rooted in his homeland no matter where he travelled. Yeats' style of poetry, especially, is obviously written to be different from any other author's and is meant to touch a part of the mind that has never before been reached by verse or prose. His approach to poetry was definitely new to the world of literature and perhaps caused the uniqueness in his writing. Yeats, through his literary works, redefined the boundaries that had limited earlier writers and presented possibilities which had not previously been considered in writing poetry. He grasped a better understanding of where poetry should originate: "We should write out our thoughts," he said, "in as nearly as possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend.".
             The life of William Butler Yeats was affected the most by the three things he loved best: Ireland, his intimate friend Maud Gonne, and literature. Yeats is born on June 13, 1865 in Dublin. His parents are John Butler Yeats, an artist, and Susan Polexfen. At the age of two, Yeats and his family move to London where his brother Jack and sisters Elizabeth and Susan are born. Yeats moves to Hammersmith, England at the age of twelve and begins writing poetry in the...