William Butler Yeats was born of Irish Protestant origin, the eldest son of a painter who was married to a shop owner’s daughter. Following the example of John Keats, a Romantic poet who remained relatively close to nature, Yeats avoided what he considered the obscurity of William Blake, whose poetic images came from mystical visions rather than from the physical world. Although he lived in London for 14 years of his childhood (and kept a permanent home there during the first half of his adult life), Yeats maintained his Irish cultural roots, many of his poems and plays. Auden praised Yeats for having written “some of the most beautiful poetry” of modern times. Concurring with Auden, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature to Yeats “for his always inspired poetry, which in its highly artistic form, gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”

Perhaps no other poem of Yeats represents Yeats’ love of his Irish roots as poignantly as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (written in 1890) which remains one of the most widely read poems across the English-speaking world.

Here is Yeat’s beautifful poem, The Lake of Innisfree.

THE LAKE OF INNISFREE

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Source: The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (Kagan Paul, Trench and Co., 1889)