Irish poet, playwright, editor, writer, senator, William Butler Yeats is among the most accomplished authors of the twentieth century; in 1923 he was awarded Nobel Prize in Literature “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” Yeats’ life spanned a turbulent time in Irish history that began with the rise of the modern home rule movement in the 1860s to the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. T. S. Eliot noted Yeats was “one of those few poets whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”