Symbolist poet, in that he used allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. Yeats chose words and assembled them so that, in addition to a particular meaning, they suggest other abstract thoughts that may seem more significant and resonant. His use of symbols is usually something physical that is both itself and a suggestion of other, perhaps immaterial, timeless qualities.

Unlike other modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional forms. The impact of modernism on his work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favour of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period. His later poetry and plays are written in a more personal vein, as well as meditations on the experience of growing old.

While Yeats's early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore, his later work was engaged with more contemporary issues, and his style underwent a dramatic transformation. His work can be divided into three general periods. The early poems are lushly pre-Raphaelite in tone, self-consciously ornate, and, at times, according to unsympathetic critics, stilted. Yeats began by writing epic poems such as The Isle of Statues and The Wanderings of Oisin. His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects. Yeats's middle period saw him abandon the pre-Raphaelite character of his early work and attempt to turn himself into a Landor-style social ironist.

Irish legends, occult in early works. Slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeats's debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats concentrated on an identifiably Irish content.

From 1900, Yeats's poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.

Inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.

William Butler Yeats  is one of Irelands most revered poets and playwrights. His work has been widely circulated and anthologised. As poetry and as song a number of his poems have been recorded and also used on radio, TV and films.W.B.Yeats 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, it was here that he met fellow poet George Russell who shared his interest in mysticism.In 1885 Yeats had his first poems published in the Dublin University Review, in 1887 he returned with his family to Chiswick, and 1890 see him along with Ernest Rhys form the Rhymers club, a group of poets who met in Fleet street, London between 1891-1894, the line up at the start included the likes of Richard Le Gallienne, Ernest Dowson,  Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symmons, John Davidson, T.W.Rolleston, Selwyn Image and Edwin Ellis. In Yeats`s memoirs, Four Years:1887-1891, Yeats claimed William Watson joined but never came, Frances Thompson came once but did not join, and Oscar Wilde would only attend meetings in private houses.

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.

In 1897 he formed a friendship with Lady Gregory and her estate, Coole Park, became the setting for several of his poems. At the beginning of 1917, he purchased the Norman stone tower, (Thoor Ballylee) near Coole Park and restored the derelict building into a summer home and a central symbol in some of his later poetry. October in the same year see his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees.

The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to him in 1923. And through out his life he wrote many poems, plays , shortstories and articles which covered many aspects from folklore to politics 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 Drumcliff in Sligo, Ireland in 1948, and now there is some doubt to the authenticity of the bones.