Irish poet, dramatist, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, senator of the Irish Free State, and the great Anglophone poet whose career spans the entire transition from late-Victorian symbolism to high modernism — a transition he made essentially on his own, reinventing his style in middle age in a way almost no other poet has managed. The early Yeats of The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) is the dreamy Celtic-Twilight lyricist of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." The later Yeats of Responsibilities (1914), The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), and The Tower (1928) is a different poet — spare, public, politically implicated, metaphysically charged.
The hinge was the 1916 Easter Rising, the unrequited decades-long love of the revolutionary Maud Gonne, and the system of symbolic history Yeats and his wife Georgie developed through automatic writing and published as A Vision (1925, rev. 1937). "Easter, 1916" ("A terrible beauty is born"), "The Second Coming" ("Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"), "Sailing to Byzantium," "Among School Children," and "Lapis Lazuli" are probably the five most-quoted poems in 20th-century English. His politics were complicated and sometimes ugly — flirtations with the Blueshirts in the 1930s, eugenicist remarks late — but they are not separable from the poetry.
He won the Nobel Prize in 1923. His long championship of Tagore, whose Gitanjali he introduced to the English-reading world in 1912, is among the more consequential acts of cross-cultural editing in modern letters.