William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) is Ireland's greatest lyric poet, and one whom many regard as the greatest poet of the twentieth century. He won the Nobel Prize in 1923 "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Although he is primarily known as a poet, he also wrote plays, fiction, and literary essay, and he led the Irish Cultural Revival by reviving Celtic mythology and Irish folklores. From 1922 to 1928 he served as the senator of the Irish Free State. Yeats is particularly known for three collections of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), The Wind among the Reeds (1899), and The Tower (1928).
             Yeats was born in Sandymount, near Dublin, Ireland. His father was a portrait painter, and Yeats studied art for three years before he decided to become a poet. He spent his childhood and later school holidays with his mother's family in the country near Sligo, in western Ireland. Although he lived in London form 1888 to 1896, he was thought of himself as an Irish writer, and Ireland remained the source of his inspiration and imagery.
             The Wind Among the Reeds became the seminal work in the development of twentieth-century poetry. Yeats's involvement in the Irish Cultural Revival led him to believe that the world could not be viewed as a totally objective reality. Instead, he believed that imagination shaped every experience. The Wind Among the Reeds thus marks the beginning of modern poetry.
             "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1892) is the best-known lyric poem of Yeats's early period. Innisfree, the Irish word for "Heather Island", is a small island in Lough (lake) Gill in western Ireland, the area in which Yeats grew up.
             The poem typified Yeats's desire to transform life-experience into art and demonstrates his ability to use words, which are tangible, to create the intangible qualitie...