ABSTRACT
William Butler Yeats and Thomas Stearns Eliot, Irish and American, are the greatest English poets of our age. William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was born in Dublin into a Protestant family with a long association with County Sligo. In London he associated with Dowson and Lionel Johnson in the Rhymers’ Club. Back in Ireland, he became a leader of the Celtic Revival. He was in love with Maud Gonne, the nationalist, and remained deeply attached to her in spite of her refusal of him. The frustrated love of Maud Gonne played its part, and no doubt the sacrifice of life in the 1916 rising transformed Yeats’s personal involvement with his fellow countrymen, as the lines in ‘Easter 1916’ indicate: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. The use of astonishingly varied rhythmic and verbal patterns that are daily to hand in living conversation is now achieved without any sense of strain and sustained without any flagging of vitality.
