Modern Poetry
W. B. YEATS
The first National Lecture was given by Robert Bridges on Poetry on February 28, 1929. Tonight W. B. Yeats is to give the eighteenth National Lecture.
There are few finer intellects or more romantic figures in the modern world than William Butler Yeats , who was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865, who left art for literature when he was twenty-one, has been poet, essayist, playwright for two generations, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He was a Senator of the Irish Free State from 1923 to 1928.
Not the least of his achievements was the part he played in the founding of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. When the Abbey Theatre broadcast one of his early one-act plays The Land of Heart's Desire, in August, 1934, it was told by Lennox Robinson in THE RADIO Times how, thirty-six years before, Yeats and his friends, at a period of national discouragement, set out to recreate a movement of Irish culture. He, with Lady Gregory and others, set out to make a theatre with no money, without a building, without a company, and with only a couple of plays. For years they struggled, and eventually, through Miss Horniman, were to have their own theatre, long since world-famous, and to give plays important not only to Ireland, but to the theatrical repertory of the world.