Page "W. B. Yeats" Paragraph 3

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in County Sligo.

He studied poetry in his youth and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult.

Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century.

His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889 and those slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelite poets.

From 1900, Yeats ' poetry grew more physical and realistic.

He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.