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60 free W. B. Yeats trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
William Butler Yeats is Ireland's greatest poet and one of the strangest lives in literature, and this trivia quiz covers all of it. The poems are here: The Lake Isle of Innisfree and the London street where it began, Easter, 1916 and its terrible beauty, The Second Coming and the titles it spawned, Sailing to Byzantium, The Wild Swans at Coole and Under Ben Bulben with its cold-eyed epitaph. So are the plays, the Abbey Theatre he co-founded with Lady Gregory and the Cuala Press run by his sisters. The life questions range from the Sligo childhood and the Golden Dawn magical motto to the four refused proposals to Maud Gonne, the proposal to her daughter, the marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees and the automatic writing that became A Vision. Later come the Nobel Prize, the Irish Senate and its divorce debate, the coinage committee, the Steinach operation, the death in France and the murky repatriation of his bones in 1948. Difficulty runs from easy to expert. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on Yeats, his poems and the people around him, and each question links to its source. Try our Irish Literature and James Joyce quizzes next.
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Q 01In which Dublin suburb was W. B. Yeats born in 1865?
Sandymount
His father was a lawyer turned portrait painter and his mother came from a west-of-Ireland milling and shipping family.
Q 02Which county did Yeats regard as his childhood and spiritual home, his "country of the heart"?
Sligo
His mother's Pollexfen family lived at Merville there, and he is buried in the county today.
Q 03Which two conditions may explain Yeats's trouble with mathematics and languages at school?
Tone deafness and dyslexia
An early Godolphin School report called him "very poor in spelling" but he loved biology and zoology.
Q 04Yeats's brother Jack won Ireland's first Olympic medal, a silver in 1924, for what?
A painting
The Liffey Swim took silver in the arts competition at the Paris Games.
Q 05How many copies of Yeats's 1886 pamphlet Mosada were printed, paid for by his father?
100
His first full collection followed in 1889.
Q 06Which long early poem, drawn from the Fenian Cycle, was one of the few youthful works Yeats never disowned?
The Wanderings of Oisin
After it he never attempted another long poem.
Q 07What magical motto did Yeats take on joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890?
Daemon est Deus inversus
It translates as "Devil is God inverted"; he recruited his uncle, Maud Gonne and Florence Farr into the order.
Q 08Which notorious occultist did MacGregor Mathers send against Yeats's side in the 'Battle of Blythe Road'?
Aleister Crowley
After the order splintered, Yeats stayed with the Stella Matutina offshoot until 1921.
Q 09What did a spirit calling itself "Leo Africanus" claim to be during séances from 1912?
Yeats's Daemon or anti-self
The idea fed into Yeats's essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae.
Q 10Yeats co-founded which London poets' group in 1890, later mythologising it as the "Tragic Generation"?
The Rhymers' Club
They met in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their verse.
Q 11Which forgotten poem did Yeats rediscover while editing the first complete Blake edition?
Vala, or, The Four Zoas
He collaborated with Edwin Ellis on the edition.
Q 12How old was Yeats when he met Maud Gonne in 1889?
24
She was an English heiress and ardent Irish nationalist, eighteen months younger than him.
Q 13How many times in total did Yeats propose to Maud Gonne between 1891 and 1916?
Five
She refused in 1891, 1899, 1900 and 1901, and again in 1916 after her husband's execution.
Q 14Whom did Maud Gonne marry in 1903, to Yeats's dismay?
Q 21On what date did the Abbey Theatre open?
27 December 1904
Cathleen ni Houlihan and Lady Gregory's Spreading the News were on the opening bill.
Q 22Which unpaid but independently wealthy secretary of Yeats helped establish the Abbey Theatre?
Annie Horniman
The Fay brothers, William and Frank, brought the theatrical experience.
Q 23Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) is set in which year of Irish rebellion?
1798
Lady Gregory wrote the peasant dialogue; Yeats wrote Cathleen's lines.
Q 24In Cathleen ni Houlihan, the old woman's "beautiful green fields" represent what?
Major John MacBride
Her earlier lover, the French politician Millevoye, was the father of her daughter.
Q 15In Gonne's 1905 Paris divorce case, which was the only accusation against MacBride that held up in court?
That he had been drunk once during the marriage
A separation was granted instead, with Gonne keeping custody of their son Seán.
Q 16Where was Maud Gonne actually born, despite her claims of Irish descent?
Near Aldershot in England
Her father was a captain in the 17th Lancers.
Q 17After Maud Gonne's final refusal in 1916, whom did Yeats propose to next?
Her daughter Iseult
Iseult, then 21, had herself proposed to him when she was fifteen; she turned him down.
Q 18Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees on 20 October 1917. How old was she?
25
Friends warned her "George ... you can't. He must be dead", but the marriage was a success.
Q 19What practice by Yeats's wife early in their marriage produced the material for A Vision?
Automatic writing
Spirits the couple called "Instructors" dictated a system of phases, cones and gyres.
Q 20Yeats founded the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 with Lady Gregory, George Moore and which other writer?
Edward Martyn
It survived about two years before evolving into the Irish National Theatre Society.
The provinces of Ireland
The play is set in Killala, County Mayo, as the French land.
Q 25The Cuala Press, which published 48 books by Yeats, was run by whom?
His sisters Elizabeth and Lily
It grew out of the Dun Emer Press, founded in 1902 in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Q 26Which American poet wintered with Yeats at Stone Cottage from 1913 to 1916?
Ezra Pound
He annoyed Yeats by publishing some of his verse in Poetry magazine with unauthorised changes.
Q 27Yeats's play At the Hawk's Well (1916) was the first he modelled on which theatrical tradition?
Japanese Noh
Pound had inherited Ernest Fenollosa's scholarship on the form from the scholar's widow.
Q 28The Lake Isle of Innisfree is an island in which lake?
Lough Gill
Yeats said the poem came to him as a sudden memory while walking down Fleet Street in London in 1888.
Q 29Which American writer's way of life did the teenage Yeats hope to imitate on Innisfree?
Henry David Thoreau
He heard a trickle of water in a London shop window and the homesick poem followed.
Q 30Easter, 1916 was first printed privately in how many copies?
25
It was not published for a general readership until 1921, in Michael Robartes and the Dancer.