WB Yeats
This Mural is dedicated to the famous poet WB Yeats. Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin, on the 13th of June 1865, to John Butler Yeats and Susan Mary Pollexfen. After Yeats’s birth, the family moved to Merville, Sligo, the location of the Pollexfen family. Sligo became Yeats’s childhood home, something reflected in many of his poems.
As a descendent of a Williamite soldier, Yeats was part of the Protestant Ascendancy. However, his family were supportive of the changes occurring in Ireland, despite them causing a power shift away from the Protestant minority. His family moved to England in 1867 so his father could further his art career.
The Butler Yeats’s continued to return to Sligo for the holidays, and William’s mother entertained him and his brother Jack with Irish folktales. Yeats first began writing when he was 17, and at the age of 23 he wrote the famous The lake Isle of Innisfree.
Yeats continued to be inspired by the landscape of County Sligo, as evident in poems such as The Song of Wandering Aengus, and Under Ben Bulben. Today Sligo is proudly known as Yeats County.