William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for his outstanding contributions to literature. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the few writers to be widely recognized during his lifetime. His works often explored themes of love, death, and the supernatural, and he is remembered as one of the greatest poets of the English language.