14 November 1923 William Butler Yeats Wins Nobel Peace Prize On 14 November 1923 Irish poet and senator, William Butler Yeats created history when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Irish citizen to achieve such an accolade.

The prize was awarded to Yeats ‘for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’. Somewhat surprised by the award, Yeats would later write in his autobiography: Early in November (1923) a journalist called to show me a printed paragraph saying that the Nobel Prize would probably be conferred upon Herr Mann, the distinguished novelist, or upon myself, I did not know that the Swedish Academy had ever heard my name. The news of the award was widely praised in Ireland with members of Dáil Éireann proudly announcing that it had placed Ireland on the international stage. It was a sentiment reiterated by the laureate himself, who at the awards ceremony claimed that the Nobel Prize was less for himself than for his country and called it Europe’s welcome to the Free State. In his presentation speech, Per Hallstrom, the then chairman of the academy’s Nobel Committee, praised the poet’s ability to ‘follow the spirit that early appointed him the interpreter of his country, a country that had long waited for someone to bestow on it a voice’. For many people Yeats was one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. The publication of his poetry which included The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. . Source newspaper: www.irishnewsarchives.com Download: Irish Independent 1905-current, Thursday, November 29, 1923; Page: 9