 Hello learners, I am Chainika Roy from the Discipline of English, Padmanath Gohan Borwa School of Humanities. Welcome to this audiovisual program. In this video, we shall be going to look at the life and works of the poet William Butler Yeats in order to appreciate his poem and Irish airman for sees his death, prescribed in your Degree for Semester General English course. The objectives of this video are to acquaint you with the poet and his personal life, to give you an idea regarding the poetic output of Yeats to explain the context of the poem and Irish airman for sees his death. You must note that besides poetry, Yeats was also a dramatist, translator and a prose writer, winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 1923. William Butler Yeats's poetry has great aesthetic beauty, with her patriotic fervour particularly in relation to the Irish cause. In fact, he was one of the most important figures with regard to the Irish literary revival. He began as a late Victorian romantic poet and ended as a 20th century metaphysical poet, fully abreast of the newer generations. It can be said that Yeats bridged the gap between the Victorians and the moderns, that is, the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, coming to the personal life of Yeats, he was an Irish poet born on June 13, 1865 in Dublin. He was the eldest son of John Butler Yeats. A painter was greatly influenced by the pre-reflites. His mother was from Sligo. She was full of love for the countryside. Yeats was greatly influenced by both his parents. The intellectual side of his personality can be attributed to his father, while his mother was instrumental in sparking his emotional instincts. In his boyhood, he was often ridiculed by the boys in the school due to the way he looked. This made him very self-conscious. However, in certain stances, he often ran away from school and was also severely punished at home but to no avail. When his family shifted to London in 1876, he stayed back and spent his carefree days in the magical countryside in Ireland with his grandparents. The beauty of the place kindled his emotions and for the first time he started expressing his thoughts in verse. You may note that his experiences and stay in Ireland was extremely important for its influence on the romantic vein in his poetic output. It was in the countryside that he was introduced to and fascinated by Irish folklore, fairy tales and the supernatural tales and he tried to blend these aspects into his poetry. It can rightly be pointed out that Yeats was influenced by his father's skepticism which made him criticize Christianity outright. Disgusted with school life, he gave up school but this does not imply that he disliked reading. In fact, he took pleasure in reading books like Shakespeare, Shelly, Kitts and others and their parents left a deep impression on his mind. Yeats let it join the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and made friends with the well-known philosopher George Russell. It was through Edward Dowden, a prominent writer that some of his earliest poems were published. In 1889 he published The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. This volume is an outstanding landmark in the poetic career of Yeats. This period is significant in Yeats's life also because he came into contact with Maud Gawne, the daughter of an English colonel and a revolutionary. Many poems were inspired by her. She remained a constant source of inspiration for him and he often symbolized her as Helen of Troy. It was during this period that he developed an interest in Indian theology as a result of his friendship with the Indian Purohit Swami who helped him in translating the Upanishads. He joined the Reimer's Club in 1891 and showed keen interest in aestheticism and the French Symbolist movement. The Reimer's Club was founded in 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rice and included a group of London-based male poets. The influence of Lady Gregory and the dramatist John Millington Singh is mentioned worthy. In 1896, he met Lady Gregory who became for nearly 40 years a frame, patron and a co-worker. Both of them casted a lasting impression on his life, personality and poetry. In the year 1902, he started working for the Irish National Theatre. He worked there till 1910. Since he was involved in many controversies he left everything and turned to poetry. After the death of John MacPreet, husband of Maudgogne, he again proposed to her but she refused. The dissolutionment of his failure in love is clearly reflected in the poems written during this period. In the year 1916, he was offered the knighthood by the British government. In 1917, he married Miss George Hyde Lees whom he had known for some years. His marriage brought stability to his life and it also proved to be the starting point of an altogether unexpected combination of the romantic and the realistic strains of his poetry. He lived a blissful married life with a daughter born in 1919 and a son in the year 1921. Along with the stability in his life carrying the maturity of his style. Mrs. Yeats attempted automatic writing and she produced odd sentences and subjects of which she knew nothing. This kind of writing is attempted without conscious control. She just went on writing in a state of trance under the influence of some supernatural agency. Yeats was excited and stimulated and he spent hours in interpreting the automatic script. Yeats was the co-founder of the Abbey Theatre and served as an Irish senator for a few years. During the last phase of his life, he sank into disillusionment and a sense of defeat and inadequacy enveloped him. In fact, this sense of disillusionment led him to produce some of his best poetry. In the year 1927 to 28, he fell ill with consumption and though he recovered temporarily, he succumbed to this grave illness on January 28, 1939. He was buried in the churchyard at Drum Cliff near County Sligu. The epitaph on his gravestone reads Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horsemen pass by. In fact, his poetic genius can be assessed by comparing the beautiful, simple, romantic poems like When You Are Old, Lake Isle of Innisfree with the profound poems like Byzantium that appeared much later. He is regarded as the national poet of Ireland and the Irish background forms the very crux of his poetry. His important poetical works like The Rose, The Wind Among the Reeds was formed from his knowledge of Irish folklore and folk tales and his interest in mysticism and the occult. Irish history and the recent search in Irish nationalism together with his adoration of the nationalist Mothgon formed the major basis of his second phase of writing style which became less lilting and incantatory as seen in the Seven Woods, The Green Helmet and Other Poems Poems written in disappointment and responsibilities poems and a play. An experiment with automatic writing eventually produced the system of mystical symbols elaborated in a vision which articulated many of the poems in collections such as Michael Roberts and the Dancer, Seven Poems and a Fragment The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems The Tower and the Winding Stairs and Other Poems The poem An Irish Airman Forces His Thieves deals with the son of one of Yitz's friends Major Robert Gregory who was killed in Italy during the First World War in 1918. The poem was written during the First World War when many Irishmen fought for the cause of Englishmen The poem is taken from the collection The Wild Swans at Coon During the First World War Ireland was a part of Great Britain it became a separate nation later in 1922 therefore when Gregory died he actually died for the English and not for the Irish The pilot in this poem sees his forthcoming death yet he does not seem regretful or scared but rather accepts the fate he is going to encounter I hope after watching this video you have got a fair idea about William Butler Yitz the poet, his poetic contributions and the background of the poem An Irish Airman Forces His Thieves Thank you