Irish poetry doesn't get more enjoyable than when it centres on William Butler Yeats, arguably the most gigantic literary figure of a nation replete with giants of literature and whose influence certainly still shapes the English language more than a century and a half after his birth.
Born on 13 June 1865, Yeats’ knowledge of English poetic form, Irish literature and Celtic mythology resulted in an inspired body of work that “gave expression to the spirit of a whole nation”, earning him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
For most of his life W.B. Yeats spent the summer at his mother’s home in County Sligo, a place that stirred his imagination and which he famously named 'The Land of Heart’s Desire'. The county’s beauty, folklore, history and geography filled his early poetry and moved him to write his most popular verse, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’.
Yeats died in France in 1939, but the literary icon had wished to be buried in a churchyard in the Sligo village of Drumcliffe, and so in 1948 his remains were relocated there. Now a place of international literary pilgrimage, his headstone famously bears the epitaph: ‘Cast a cold Eye on Life, on Death. Horseman pass by!’.
From the churchyard, the omnipresent Ben Bulben can be seen towering, immortalised in Yeats’ poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’. Undoubtedly Ireland’s most distinctive peak, today the surrounding area on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way is known as Yeats Country and is central to any real or virtual exploration of the poet’s work.