The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats was born of a Protestant family, and spent much of his youth moving back and forth between Ireland and England. Yeats is in some respects a man of the nineteenth century, old enough to experience the high Victorian period, the expansion of the colonial powers, and the onset of religious scepticism; but he is also very much of a leading figure for the twentieth.

His poem Easter 1916 prophesies the birth of the Irish nation after the failed rebellion on that day. His poem The Second Coming (1921) is apocalyptic in its imagery, expressing the widespread disenchantment with the ideal of progress that as dashed on the battlefields of the Great War. A weary and morally spent aristocracy is presented as lacking all conviction, and in their wake the worst in society are gaining their voices. His final poem, Sailing to Byzantium (1926) represents a sort of poetic manifesto on Yeats' notion of poetry and immortality, less naturalistic in its idealization and more mannered, much as the other Modernists were. Echoes of other works of literary greatness are to be found throughout.

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