W. B. Yeats

The Mystica Encyclopedia · All entries · Rewritten September 2026

W. B. Yeats at a glance

Life and Literary Career

Yeats was born in Sandymount, near Dublin, the son of the painter John Butler Yeats, and spent much of his childhood between London and his mother's family home in County Sligo, whose landscapes and stories shaped his imagination. He studied art in Dublin but soon devoted himself to poetry. His early collections, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), drew on Irish myth and a dreamy, symbolic style.

With Lady Gregory and others he founded the Irish Literary Theatre, which led to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and he became a central figure of the Irish Literary Revival. His later poetry, including "Easter, 1916," "The Second Coming" and "Sailing to Byzantium," is regarded as some of the finest in the English language. He served as a senator of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928 and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. He died in France in January 1939 and was reburied at Drumcliff, County Sligo, in 1948.

Theosophy and the Golden Dawn

Yeats's interest in the occult began early. In 1885 he helped form the Dublin Hermetic Society, a small group devoted to the study of Eastern religion and mysticism. In London he met Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and joined the Theosophical Society, including its Esoteric Section, though his desire to test occult claims by experiment led to his departure around 1890.

In 1890 he was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the ceremonial magic society founded by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and others. He rose into its inner order, studied Kabbalistic symbolism, tarot and ritual, and remained involved for many years. He played a part in the order's internal disputes around 1900, including the conflict with Mathers and the opposition to Aleister Crowley's advancement. His friend and muse Maud Gonne was also briefly a member.

Fairy Lore and Celtic Mysticism

Yeats treated Irish folk belief with seriousness and sympathy. He edited Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and wrote The Celtic Twilight (1893), a collection of stories about fairies, ghosts and seers told to him by country people in Sligo and Galway. With Lady Gregory he gathered further accounts of belief in the "good people" and in healers and seers.

In the 1890s he also planned a Celtic mystical order, a ritual society that would combine Irish mythology with ceremonial magic, working on it with Maud Gonne and others. Although the project was never fully realized, it shows how Yeats hoped to unite national culture and spiritual practice. His poetry of this period is full of figures from Celtic mythology, such as the Sidhe, Aengus and Cuchulain, used as symbols of a hidden spiritual world.

Automatic Writing and A Vision

In October 1917 Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who shared his occult interests and had been initiated into the Stella Matutina, an offshoot of the Golden Dawn. Within days of the wedding she began automatic writing, and later speech during sleep, which the couple attributed to communicators they called the "Instructors." Over several years the sessions produced thousands of pages of material. Scholars continue to debate how far the process reflected her own creativity and learning.

Yeats organized this material into A Vision, privately published in 1925 and substantially revised in 1937. The book describes a system of interlocking "gyres" and a Great Wheel of twenty-eight phases of the moon, used to classify human personalities and to chart the cycles of history, each lasting about two thousand years. Its imagery directly informs poems such as "The Second Coming" and "Byzantium." Yeats himself sometimes described the system as a set of metaphors for poetry rather than literal truth.

Legacy in Literature and Esotericism

Yeats is unusual among major modern poets for the depth and persistence of his occult practice. For much of the twentieth century critics tended to treat it as an embarrassing eccentricity, but more recent scholarship regards magic, Kabbalah and Theosophy as central to his thought and to the symbolism of his greatest work.

For historians of esotericism, he is an important witness to the occult revival of the 1880s to 1920s, which linked spiritualism, Theosophy, ceremonial magic and a renewed interest in folklore. His career shows how that revival influenced high literature. Readers may also compare other figures of the period, such as Dion Fortune, who also came through the Golden Dawn tradition, and G. I. Gurdjieff, whose esoteric system developed in the same years.

Related entries

On The Mystica today: The Moon tarot card

Frequently asked questions