William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 13th June 1865 but moved to Chiswick, London in 1867 due to his fathers career as a lawyer and did not return to Ireland until 1881, where he studied at the Metropolitan School of Art. In 1885 Yeats had his first poems published in the Dublin University Review, before returning with his family to Chiswick in 1887. In 1889 he met his great love, Maud Gonne (1866-1953), who became the subject of his early love poetry, but she was to marry Major John MacBride in 1903, which was the inspiration of his poem, No Second Troy.

At the beginning of 1917, he purchased the Norman stone tower, (Thoor Ballylee) near Coole Park and restored the derelict building into a summer house and central symbol in some of his later poetry. October in the same year saw his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923; and throughout his life also wrote many articles, and short stories including the controversial Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). W B Yeats died at the Hotel Ideal Sejour in 1939 and was buried in Menton, France but his coffin was later moved to Druncliff in Sligo, Ireland in 1948.