Page "W. B. Yeats" Paragraph 6

In 1867, the family moved to England to aid their father, John, to further his career as an artist.

At first the Yeats children were educated at home.

Their mother entertained them with stories and Irish folktales.

John provided an erratic education in geography and chemistry, and took William on natural history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside.

On 26 January 1877, the young poet entered the Godolphin school, which he attended for four years.

He did not distinguish himself academically, and an early school report describes his performance as " only fair.

Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject.

Very poor in spelling.

" Though he had difficulty with mathematics and languages ( possibly because Yeats was tone deaf ,) he was fascinated by biology and zoology.

For financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin toward the end of 1880, living at first in the suburb of Harold's Cross and later in the suburb of Howth.

In October 1881, Yeats resumed his education at Dublin's Erasmus Smith High School.

His father's studio was located nearby and William spent a great deal of time there, and met many of the city's artists and writers.

It was during this period that he started writing poetry, and, in 1885, Yeats ' first poems, as well as an essay entitled " The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson ", were published in the Dublin University Review.

Between 1884 and 1886, William attended the Metropolitan School of Art — now the National College of Art and Design — in Thomas Street.

His first known works were written when he was seventeen, and included a poem — heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley — that describes a magician who set up a throne in central Asia.

Other pieces from this period include a draft of a play about a Bishop, a monk, and a woman accused of paganism by local shepherds, as well as love-poems and narrative lyrics on medieval German knights.

The early works were both conventional and, according to the critic Charles Johnston, " utterly unIrish ", seeming to come out of a " vast murmurous gloom of dreams ".

Although Yeats ' early works drew heavily on Shelley, Edmund Spenser, and on the diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse, he soon turned to Irish mythology and folklore and the writings of William Blake.

In later life, Yeats paid tribute to Blake by describing him as one of the " great artificers of God who uttered great truths to a little clan ".