William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet born in 1865 in Sandymount, Ireland. As a child, he moved with his family to Sligo and later England for his father's work as an artist. He showed early interest in writing and had works published in his teens. Yeats was fascinated with Irish folklore which influenced his poetry. He studied the occult and incorporated those interests into his realistic poems starting in 1900. Yeats continued writing poetry until his death in 1939 at age 74.