Yeats  (yāts)  Irish writer. A founder of the Irish National Theatre Company at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, he wrote many short plays, including The Countess Cathleen (1892). His poetry, published in collections such as The Winding Stair (1929), ranges from early love lyrics to the complex symbolist works of his later years. He won the 1923 Nobel Prize for literature. Yeats'i·an adj. |
An Irish poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, regarded by many as the greatest modern poet in English. Some of his best-known poems are “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Second Coming,” and “Among School Children.”