On January 18, 1914, Ezra Pound, helped by William Butler Yeats, and, behind the scenes, by Yeats’s patron and friend, Lady Gregory, held a luncheon for Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a man whom Pound regarded ...

Mistakes are instructive. In particular, they can become a form of analysis, as, for example, in sports or music, when getting something a little bit wrong leads to improvement in technique or ...

There was only one member of the Yeats family to win an Olympic medal for art—and it was not William Butler. In Sandymount, Ireland, 150 years ago this year, one of the greatest poets of the 20th ...

William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" a hundred years ago, when the world seemed on the verge. Perhaps like now, perhaps like many years. The losses of the First World War were still ...

In his influential book The Empty Space the English director Peter Brook wrote about what he called the Holy Theatre, or "the notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear". He ...

In Ireland, they put James Joyce’s picture on the 10 pound note, and for a good many years authors were allowed to pay no income tax. They take writing seriously in that country. More precisely, they ...

At a conference in the US I heard the keynote speaker quote William Butler Yeats: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." I liked the quote. The speaker went on to say ...

William Butler Yeats, at the age of seventy-three, stands well within the company of the great poets. He is still writing, and the poems which now appear, usually embedded in short plays or set into ...

William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865 in Sandymount in Dublin and went on to become a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival in the late 19th century. In 1923, the talented Irish ...

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. Looking through the Atlantic archives on William Butler Yeats’s birthday ...