Four Years

Yeats was a leading 20th century poet and dramatist. He was a co founder of the Abbey Theater. In 1923 he won the Nobel Prize in literature. Many believe he wrote his greatest works after receiving the Nobel Prize. Yeats's writing is said to bridge the gap between the romantic period and the modern era. Four Years begins: 'At the end of the eighties my father and mother, my brother and sisters and myself, all newly arrived from Dublin, were settled in Bedford Park in a red-brick house with several wood mantelpieces copied from marble mantlepieces by the brothers Adam, a balcony, and a little garden shadowed by a great horse-chestnut tree. Years before we had lived there, when the crooked, ostentatiously picturesque streets, with great trees casting great shadows, had been anew enthusiasm: the Pre-Raphaelite movement at last affecting life. But now exaggerated criticism had taken the place of enthusiasm; the tiled roofs, the first in modern London, were said to leak, which they did not, & the drains to be bad, though that was no longer true; and I imagine that houses were cheap.'