W. B. Yeats Trivia
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51 free W. B. Yeats trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
William Butler Yeats is Ireland's greatest poet and one of the strangest lives in literature, and this trivia quiz covers all of it. The poems are here: The Lake Isle of Innisfree and the London street where it began, Easter, 1916 and its terrible beauty, The Second Coming and the titles it spawned, Sailing to Byzantium, The Wild Swans at Coole and Under Ben Bulben with its cold-eyed epitaph. So are the plays, the Abbey Theatre he co-founded with Lady Gregory and the Cuala Press run by his sisters. The life questions range from the Sligo childhood and the Golden Dawn magical motto to the four refused proposals to Maud Gonne, the proposal to her daughter, the marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees and the automatic writing that became A Vision. Later come the Nobel Prize, the Irish Senate and its divorce debate, the coinage committee, the Steinach operation, the death in France and the murky repatriation of his bones in 1948. Difficulty runs from easy to expert. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on Yeats, his poems and the people around him, and each question links to its source. Try our Irish Literature and James Joyce quizzes next.
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Q 01In Yeats's early poem The Stolen Child, who lures the child away?
Faeries
Faeries: they coax the human child to come away with them, since the world, they say, holds more weeping than he can understand.
Q 02Which county did Yeats regard as his childhood and spiritual home, his "country of the heart"?
Sligo
Sligo: his mother's wealthy Pollexfen family came from there, and he spent childhood holidays in the county.
Q 03In Yeats's poem Leda and the Swan, which god takes the form of the swan?
Zeus
Zeus: the poem looks ahead to what the union sets off, the Trojan War and the death of Agamemnon.
Q 04Which long Yeats poem, drawn from the Fenian Cycle of Irish myth, gave its title to his 1889 collection?
The Wanderings of Oisin
The Wanderings of Oisin ends back in Ireland: leaning from his fairy horse to fling a sack of sand, Oisin snaps the saddle girth and lands a man three hundred years old.
Q 05Which secret society of ritual magic did Yeats join in 1890?
The Golden Dawn
The Golden Dawn drew in Georgie Hyde-Lees too: she joined in 1914, and three years later she married Yeats.
Q 06Which occultist did MacGregor Mathers send against Yeats's side in the 'Battle of Blythe Road'?
Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley had been refused promotion by the London adepts, so Mathers overrode them and initiated him into the order's inner grade himself, in Paris.
Q 07What did Yeats take "Leo Africanus", a spirit voice heard at séances, to be?
Yeats's Daemon or anti-self
Yeats's Daemon or anti-self, Yeats decided, and he wrote the spirit letters about his doubts, then wrote Leo's replies himself.
Q 08Yeats co-founded which London club in 1890, whose members he later called the "Tragic Generation"?
The Rhymers' Club
The Rhymers' Club looked doomed in hindsight: many members died young, among them Ernest Dowson at 32 and Lionel Johnson at 35.
Q 09Which forgotten poem did Yeats rediscover while editing the first complete Blake edition?
Vala, or, The Four Zoas
Vala, or, The Four Zoas was an unfinished manuscript Blake gave up on around 1807; its text first reached print in the 1893 edition Yeats made with Edwin Ellis.
Q 10Which Irish party did Maud Gonne help found?
Sinn Féin
Sinn Féin grew out of the National Council, which Gonne and Arthur Griffith set up in 1903 to campaign against King Edward VII's visit to Ireland.
Q 11What did Maud Gonne say the world gained when she refused Yeats?
His poetry
His poetry: she told him his unhappiness fed it, and he kept turning her into verse, casting her as Helen of Troy in 'No Second Troy'.
Q 12Whom did Maud Gonne marry in 1903, to Yeats's dismay?
Major John MacBride
Major John MacBride had fought the British in the Boer War; Gonne became a Catholic four days before their Paris wedding, against both families' wishes.
Q 13What did a Paris court grant Maud Gonne when she sought to end her marriage?
A legal separation
A legal separation, not a divorce, and she won custody of their son Seán, while her husband went back to Ireland.
Q 21In Cathleen ni Houlihan, the old woman's "beautiful green fields" represent what?
The provinces of Ireland
The provinces of Ireland are her four stolen fields; once a young man leaves to fight for her, she is seen walking away as a young girl with the walk of a queen.
Q 22Which American poet wintered with Yeats at Stone Cottage from 1913 to 1916?
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound was nominally Yeats's secretary, and after marrying Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 he brought his new wife to the cottage for the next two winters.
Q 23Yeats's play At the Hawk's Well (1916) was the first he modelled on which theatrical tradition?
Japanese Noh
Q 14Where was Maud Gonne actually born, despite her claims of Irish descent?
Near Aldershot in England
Near Aldershot in England; she spent part of her childhood in Ireland after her father, an army captain, was posted to the Curragh.
Q 15After Maud Gonne's last refusal, whom did Yeats propose to next?
Her daughter Iseult
Her daughter Iseult had proposed to Yeats herself at fifteen, and he had turned her down; this time she was the one who refused.
Q 16What practice by Yeats's wife early in their marriage produced the material for A Vision?
Automatic writing
Automatic writing began on their honeymoon, when George tried it to distract her brooding husband.
Q 17Which Yeats play was the Irish Literary Theatre's first production, in 1899?
The Countess Cathleen
The Countess Cathleen sells her soul to the devil to save her starving tenants; Yeats dedicated the play to Maud Gonne.
Q 18What had part of the Abbey Theatre's building once been?
The city morgue
The city morgue: the old hall had no room for a lobby, so the adjoining morgue became the theatre's entrance.
Q 19Which wealthy English patron paid for the conversion that created the Abbey Theatre?
Annie Horniman
Annie Horniman soon started a repertory company of her own in Manchester, though she went on paying toward the Abbey until 1910.
Q 20What did Yeats fear Cathleen ni Houlihan had done?
Got men shot
Got men shot, Yeats feared in The Man and the Echo, since the play ends with an old woman calling young men to die for Ireland.
Japanese Noh, with its masks, dance and song, let Yeats write for a small audience of initiates instead of the crowds of the public theatre.
Q 24Which American writer's way of life did the teenage Yeats hope to imitate on Innisfree?
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau had built himself a cabin by Walden Pond, and the poem's speaker also dreams of building a small cabin on the island.
Q 25Which poem's refrain is "A terrible beauty is born"?
Easter, 1916
Easter, 1916: Yeats admits he had once exchanged only polite meaningless words with the rebels the Rising transformed.
Q 26Which woman does Yeats portray among the rebels in his poem on the Rising?
Constance Markievicz
Constance Markievicz, whose death sentence for her part in the Rising was commuted on account of her sex.
Q 27In Yeats's cyclical system, how often do the gyres reach a crisis that births a new civilisation?
Every two millennia
Every two millennia, Yeats believed, so the era that began with Christ's birth was ending in his own century, and a new order was due.
Q 28Which 1958 novel by Chinua Achebe takes its title from a line in The Second Coming?
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart borrows the poem's third line for its story of an Igbo clan's old order collapsing under colonial rule and missionaries.
Q 29No Country for Old Men takes its title from which Yeats poem's opening line?
Sailing to Byzantium
Sailing to Byzantium has an aging man leave the country of the young for Byzantium, hoping to shed his dying body and live on as a golden bird.
Q 30The Wild Swans at Coole was written at Lady Gregory's home, Coole Park, in which county?
Galway
Galway is where Coole Park stands, and there Yeats counted fifty-nine swans on the lake, sensing he had aged while their hearts had not grown old.