William Butler Yeats ranks among the greatest literary talents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though best-known as the author of poems as timeless and delicately crafted as The Lake Isle of Innisfree and for his unrequited love of Maud Gonne, he exerted a remarkable influence in many other aspects of Irish life: a brother to the artist Jack B. Yeats, he was also a leading light of the Irish Literary Revival, founder of the Abbey Theatre and two-term senator. This volume forms a compact introduction to his life and the events shaped his work.