William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority of Ireland. Yeats staunchly affirmed his Irish nationality. Although he lived in London for 14 years of his childhood (and kept a permanent home there during the first half of his adult life), Yeats maintained his cultural roots, featuring Irish legends and heroes in many of his poems and plays.
W.B. Yeats’ «When You Are Old» is a poignant love poem about regret, aging, and the contrast between superficial admiration and deep, enduring love. Written in 1893 to his muse Maude Gonne, it warns a beloved to consider how she will look back in her old age on a missed opportunity for true affection.
While William Shakespeare’s reputation is based primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a poet. Shakespeare’s exact birth date remains unknown. He was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564, his mother’s third child, but the first to survive infancy.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are a collection of 154 poems published in 1609, primarily exploring love, time, beauty, and mortality. They follow a 14-line English form (three quatrains and a couplet), famously addressing a «Fair Youth» (1–126) and a «Dark Lady» (127–154). Key themes include immortality through verse and the complexities of desire.
SONNET 18 This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets
ROMEO AND JULIET Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare is a tragic tale of two teenagers from feuding families—the Montagues and Capulets—in Verona, Italy, who fall in love at first sight, marry in secret, and die by suicide, a tragedy that ultimately ends their parents’ feud.