William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Nobel Prize winning Irish dramatist, author and poet wrote The Celtic Twilight (1893);
Paddy Flynn is dead;....He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our on romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland ah, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstahan did Homer himself.
Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the a simplicity and amplitude of imagination.....Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everythis, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.—ch. 1, 「A Teller of Tales」
As one of the founders of the Irish Literary Revival, along with J. M. Synge (1871-1909) [whom he met in 1896], Sean O』Casey (1880-1964), and Padraig (Padrai (1881-1972) Yeats』 works draw heavily on Irish mythology and history. He never fully embraced his Protestant past nor joihe majority of Ireland』s Roman Catholics but he devoted much of his life to study in myriad other subjects including theosophy, mysticism, spiritualism, and the Kabbalah. At a young age he was reading Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Donne and the works of William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, reended by his father and inspiration for his owivity, but fellow Irish poets Standish James O』Grady (1846-1928) and Sir William Ferguson (1818-1886) were perhaps the most iial. A devoted patriot, Yeats found his voice to speak out against the harsh Nationalist policies of the time. His early dramatic works vey his respect for Irish legend and fasation with the occult, while his later plays take on a more poetical and experimental aspect: Japanese Noh plays and modernism being major influences. While his works explore the greater themes of life in trast to art, and findiy in the mundane, he also produced many works of an intimate quality especially in his later years as father and aging man of letters. We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry—「Anima Hominis,」 Essays (1924). Yeats spent most of his life between Sligo, Dublin, and London, but his profound influeo future poets and playwrights and theatre, musid film be seen the world over.