1865-1939 · Irish poet and dramatist, leader of the Irish Literary Revival
About W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin, the son of the painter John Butler Yeats, and grew up between Ireland and London. A leader of the Irish Literary Revival and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, he moved from the dreamy lyrics of the 1890s to the hard, public poetry of his maturity. He served as a senator of the Irish Free State from 1922 and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.
written 1919; published 1920 · Early 20th Century · Poetry
The Second Coming is a twenty-two-line poem in two verse paragraphs in which Yeats imagines the end of the Christian era and the birth of something terrible to replace it. He wrote it in January 1919, in the months after the First World War, with the Russian Revolution and its violence recent and Ireland moving toward its own war of independence.