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Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 -1822. |
From an early age, W. B. Yeats took little interest in schooling, and his formal education was very inconsistent. Of his early education, he later said, “Because I had found it difficult to attend to anything less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to teach.” When his family lived in London in the late 1870s, Yeats attended a day school in Hammersmith, the Godolphin, with less than stellar results. He was more interested in listening to his father’s friends, mostly painters under the Pre-Raphaelite influence. After the Yeats family returned to Ireland in 1880, Yeats attended high school for three years and then, instead of applying for entrance to Trinity College as might have been expected, entered the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. His artistic talent, however, could not guard against his continued interest in literature, and he began writing more, basing his work on Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley. One biographer writes that Prometheus Unbound served as Yeats’s sacred book during his earliest years as a poet. This first edition of Prometheus Unbound contains several additional poems by Shelley and represents one of the earliest literary influences on Yeats’s writing. |
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Sharp, William, 1855 -1905. This biography of Shelley by William Sharp, was published by Walter Scott in 1887. Sharp met Yeats shortly after Yeats moved back to London with his family. Both Yeats and Sharp admired Shelley’s poetry and aspired to emulate it. |
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Blake & Shelley: Literary Influences & Yeats' Early Works | Mysticism, Celtic Myth & the Occult | Yeats & His Circle
