As well as being one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is the greatest lyric poet that Ireland has ever produced. He was the acknowledged leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.His earl lyrical poetry includes 'When You Are Old', 'The Cloths of Heaven' and 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' but, unusually for a poet, Yeats's later work surpasses the poems of his youth. T. S. Eliot described him as 'one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them'.
