60 Fun Facts About W. B. Yeats

In which Dublin suburb was W. B. Yeats born in 1865?

His father was a lawyer turned portrait painter and his mother came from a west-of-Ireland milling and shipping family.

Which county did Yeats regard as his childhood and spiritual home, his "country of the heart"?

His mother's Pollexfen family lived at Merville there, and he is buried in the county today.

Which two conditions may explain Yeats's trouble with mathematics and languages at school?

An early Godolphin School report called him "very poor in spelling" but he loved biology and zoology.

Yeats's brother Jack won Ireland's first Olympic medal, a silver in 1924, for what?

The Liffey Swim took silver in the arts competition at the Paris Games.

How many copies of Yeats's 1886 pamphlet Mosada were printed, paid for by his father?

His first full collection followed in 1889.

Which long early poem, drawn from the Fenian Cycle, was one of the few youthful works Yeats never disowned?

After it he never attempted another long poem.

What magical motto did Yeats take on joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890?

It translates as "Devil is God inverted"; he recruited his uncle, Maud Gonne and Florence Farr into the order.

Which notorious occultist did MacGregor Mathers send against Yeats's side in the 'Battle of Blythe Road'?

After the order splintered, Yeats stayed with the Stella Matutina offshoot until 1921.

What did a spirit calling itself "Leo Africanus" claim to be during séances from 1912?

The idea fed into Yeats's essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae.

Yeats co-founded which London poets' group in 1890, later mythologising it as the "Tragic Generation"?

They met in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their verse.

Which forgotten poem did Yeats rediscover while editing the first complete Blake edition?

He collaborated with Edwin Ellis on the edition.

How old was Yeats when he met Maud Gonne in 1889?

She was an English heiress and ardent Irish nationalist, eighteen months younger than him.

How many times in total did Yeats propose to Maud Gonne between 1891 and 1916?

She refused in 1891, 1899, 1900 and 1901, and again in 1916 after her husband's execution.

Whom did Maud Gonne marry in 1903, to Yeats's dismay?

Her earlier lover, the French politician Millevoye, was the father of her daughter.

In Gonne's 1905 Paris divorce case, which was the only accusation against MacBride that held up in court?

A separation was granted instead, with Gonne keeping custody of their son Seán.

Where was Maud Gonne actually born, despite her claims of Irish descent?

Her father was a captain in the 17th Lancers.

After Maud Gonne's final refusal in 1916, whom did Yeats propose to next?

Iseult, then 21, had herself proposed to him when she was fifteen; she turned him down.

Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees on 20 October 1917. How old was she?

Friends warned her "George ... you can't. He must be dead", but the marriage was a success.

What practice by Yeats's wife early in their marriage produced the material for A Vision?

Spirits the couple called "Instructors" dictated a system of phases, cones and gyres.

Yeats founded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 with Lady Gregory, George Moore and which other writer?

It survived about two years before evolving into the Irish National Theatre Society.

On what date did the Abbey Theatre open?

Cathleen ni Houlihan and Lady Gregory's Spreading the News were on the opening bill.

Which unpaid but independently wealthy secretary of Yeats helped establish the Abbey Theatre?

The Fay brothers, William and Frank, brought the theatrical experience.

Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) is set in which year of Irish rebellion?

Lady Gregory wrote the peasant dialogue; Yeats wrote Cathleen's lines.

In Cathleen ni Houlihan, the old woman's "beautiful green fields" represent what?

The play is set in Killala, County Mayo, as the French land.

The Cuala Press, which published 48 books by Yeats, was run by whom?

It grew out of the Dun Emer Press, founded in 1902 in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Which American poet wintered with Yeats at Stone Cottage from 1913 to 1916?

He annoyed Yeats by publishing some of his verse in Poetry magazine with unauthorised changes.

Yeats's play At the Hawk's Well (1916) was the first he modelled on which theatrical tradition?

Pound had inherited Ernest Fenollosa's scholarship on the form from the scholar's widow.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree is an island in which lake?

Yeats said the poem came to him as a sudden memory while walking down Fleet Street in London in 1888.

Which American writer's way of life did the teenage Yeats hope to imitate on Innisfree?

He heard a trickle of water in a London shop window and the homesick poem followed.

Easter, 1916 was first printed privately in how many copies?

It was not published for a general readership until 1921, in Michael Robartes and the Dancer.

How many leaders of the Easter Rising were executed, the men mourned in Easter, 1916?

Yeats admits he had exchanged only "polite meaningless words" with them before the rising.

Which magazine first printed Yeats's 'The Second Coming' in November 1920?

Yeats's pregnant wife had caught the 1918-19 flu in the weeks before he wrote it.

In Yeats's cyclical system, how often do the gyres reach a crisis that births a new civilisation?

His early drafts called the poem "the second birth" rather than "the Second Coming".

Which 1958 novel by Chinua Achebe takes its title from a line in The Second Coming?

Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem borrows from the poem's last line.

Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men takes its title from the opening line of which Yeats poem?

Written in 1926, it is Yeats's great statement on the agony of old age.

The Wild Swans at Coole was written at Lady Gregory's home, Coole Park, in which county?

Coole was the central meeting place of the Irish Literary Revival.

For what nominal sum did Yeats buy the tower house Thoor Ballylee near Gort around 1916-17?

He dropped the word "castle" for the Irish túr, and the family summered there from 1921 to 1929.

Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in which year?

He was the first Irish laureate in literature and had been nominated seven times before.

What did Yeats say his Nobel honour represented, in replies to letters of congratulation?

For the first time he had money, and paid off his father's debts as well as his own.

Yeats served two terms in which body from 1922?

He retired from it in 1928 because of ill health.

Opposing a divorce ban in the Senate, Yeats said of Irish Protestants: 'we are no ...' what?

He warned that governing by Catholic ideas alone meant "you will never get the North".

What did the 1924 committee Yeats chaired, which chose designs by Percy Metcalfe, decide?

He wanted designs "elegant, racy of the soil, and utterly unpolitical".

For which Irish quasi-fascist movement did Yeats compose marching songs in the 1930s?

They were never used, and he later distanced himself somewhat from the movement.

What "rejuvenating" procedure did Yeats undergo at 68, giving him what he called a "strange second puberty"?

It was performed by Norman Haire; affairs with Margot Ruddock and Ethel Mannin followed.

Yeats edited which anthology in 1936?

He also translated the Upanishads with Shri Purohit Swami in Mallorca around the same time.

Where did Yeats die in January 1939?

He died of heart failure at the Hôtel Idéal Beauséjour near Menton, aged 73.

Seán MacBride, who oversaw the return of Yeats's remains to Ireland in 1948, held what government post?

The body had been moved to a communal ossuary in 1946, and the French secretly funded the repatriation.

Yeats's remains were carried home to Ireland in 1948 aboard what?

He was reburied at St Columba's Church, Drumcliff, where his great-grandfather had been rector.

Yeats's epitaph is taken from the last lines of which poem, drafted in August 1938?

Larry McMurtry's first novel, Horseman, Pass By, takes its title from the same closing line.

Which mountain stands over Yeats's grave at Drumcliff?

The churchyard also has an early medieval Irish high cross and the county's only round tower.

Yeats told his wife that once the newspapers had forgotten him, a year after his death, she should do what?

His wish was to be buried quickly in France with a minimum of fuss.

Yeats wrote the preface for the English translation of which Nobel-winning work by Rabindranath Tagore?

He wrote it in 1913, the year Tagore won the prize.

Where in London was the young Yeats educated for four years from January 1877?

An early report rated him 'only fair', perhaps better in Latin than anything else and 'very poor in spelling'.

Which paranormal research organisation did Yeats join in 1911?

He was also influenced by Emanuel Swedenborg and wrote in 1892 that 'the mystical life is the centre of all that I do'.

Which Brahmin lecturer from the Theosophical Society introduced Yeats to Hindu thought in 1885?

The Dublin Theosophical lodge opened that year, and Yeats attended his first séance the year after.

Who introduced Yeats to Lady Gregory in 1896?

Gregory encouraged his nationalism and pushed him towards drama; together they became founders of the Irish Literary Revival.

Which surgeon performed the Steinach operation on Yeats in April 1934?

In the five years that followed Yeats had affairs with the actress Margot Ruddock and the novelist Ethel Mannin and wrote prolifically.

What was the official cause of Yeats's death at the Hôtel Idéal Beauséjour in 1939?

He was buried privately at Roquebrune; his body was later moved to an ossuary, which cast doubt on the remains returned to Ireland in 1948.

Outside which building in Sligo was Rowan Gillespie's 1989 statue of Yeats erected?

Receiving his Nobel in Stockholm, Yeats had remarked on the resemblance between the Royal Palace there and the Ulster Bank.

In which Dublin-area village was Balscadden House, Yeats's cottage home from 1880 to 1883?

A blue plaque marks the house; another, erected in 1957, marks his former London home at 23 Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill.