Death of William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats died on 28 January 1939 in Menton, aged 73. An Irish poet and playwright, Yeats was born in Dublin and spent much of his childhood in County Sligo, which inspired much of his work. He was a leading figure of the Irish literary revival, co-founding the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with Lady Gregory. His early poems drew on Irish myth, as in The Lake Isle of Innisfree, but his later work, in volumes like The Tower, shows a harder, more modern voice, with poems such as Easter 1916, The Second Coming and Sailing to Byzantium. He took an interest in mysticism and the occult, and served as a senator of the Irish Free State. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

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