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William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865.

He was raised in London in his painter father’s bohemian circle, but he gained a love of Irish literature and mythology through summers spent at his mother’s home in County Sligo. His early poems reflect this passion.

Yeats lived during a period of great change in his native country as it fought to achieve full independence from Britain.

In the poem Easter 1916 he wrote of the Easter Rising in Dublin. He knew men executed by firing squad after the failed rebellion. At the end of the poem he names all those who were shot and concludes with the line, “A terrible beauty is born.”

At this time, many Irishmen were fighting for Britain in World War One.

In An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, Yeats tries to show how they struggled with their identity as Irishmen risking their lives for a country they did not feel was their own.

He believed passionately in a brand of Irish Nationalism where art and literature revived myth and legend, and where courageous political figures would give Ireland a sense of what it was to be Irish.

The question of national identity was never far from the poet’s mind.

The airman in the poem may well be based on Major Robert Gregory. Robert was the son of Yeats’ patron, Lady Augusta Gregory. His plane was shot down in 1918.