William Butler Yeats, a most famous Irish writer, was born in Dublin in 1865. His childhood ___ the harmony that was ____ of a happy family. Later, Yeats shocked his family by saying that he remembered “little of childhood but its pain”. In fact, he inherited(继承) excellent taste in ____ from his family — both his father and his brother were painters. But he finally ____ literature, ____ drama and poetry.

Yeats had strong ____ in the coming of new artistic movements. He set himself the ____ task in founding an Irish national theatre in the late 1890s. His early theatrical experiments,____, were not received ____ at the beginning. He didn’t lose heart, and finally enjoyed ____ in his poetical drama.

___ with his dramatic works, Yeats’s poems attract much ____ notice. The subject matter includes love, nature, history, time and aging. Though Yeats generally relied on very traditional forms, he brought modern sensibility to them. As his literary life ____, his poetry grew finer and richer, which led him to worldwide ____.

He had not ____ a major public life ____ winning the Nobel Prize in 1923. Yet, he ____ writing almost to the end of his life. Had Yeats stopped writing at age 40, he would probably now be ____ as a minor poet, for there is no other example in literary history of a poet who ____ his greatest works between the ages of 50 and 75. After Yeats’s death in 1939, W.H.Auden wrote, among others, the following lines:

Earth, receive an ____ guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel (船) lie.

Emptied of its poetry.