W.B. Yeats

Irish poet who wrote some of the greatest poems in the English language (The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, Among School Children) — and who developed a complex private mythological system (A Vision) through automatic writing with his wife George — one of the few major poets whose mysticism was as serious as his art.

Created the most ambitious mythological system in modern English poetry — A Vision's gyres and the 28 phases of the moon provide a cosmology that informed his later poetry — and The Second Coming's 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold' became the defining image of 20th century cultural dissolution.