Yeats's poetry is permeated with Irish history and culture, and his life and works are irrevocably intertwined with the nation. T. S. Eliot said that Yeats is "one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them."
Yeats was born in Sandymount in 1865, near Dublin, and he also spent childhood summers in County Sligo, home to the lake which inspired Yeats's poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," and which also sports Ben Bulben, a mountain on the county's coast near which Yeats is buried. "The Wild Swans at Coole" was written in County Galway, a rural coastal region famous for its unpredictable weather and for the Cliffs of Moher, among other natural attractions.
Yeats lived during a tumultuous and decisive time in Ireland. His relationship to the nation is mirrored in his poems, including in "The Wild Swans at Coole," which expresses a kind of dual view of life—in one sense it honors life's eternal mysteries, while on the other hand it mourns loss and decay. Similarly, Yeats saw a multitude of different sides of Ireland during his lifetime, some eternal and romantic, others violent and unpredictable.
On one hand, he was drawn to the occult and to spirituality by his interest in ancient Irish legends and by his reverence for its landscape, which inspired poems like "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." On the other, he witnessed a host of bloody conflicts on Irish soil. Yeats was born only a decade or so after the end of the brutal Irish potato famine, which killed over a million people and left the nation badly shaken. The 1890s saw the rise of Irish nationalism, and the Catholic-Protestant divide. Yeats was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood during the first part of his life and was also an Irish nationalist, favoring authoritarian leadership over individualism and mob rule, but he also distanced himself from political events throughout his life, often retreating from politics and the public eye to write.
In spite of his complex relationship to politics, Yeats remained unfailingly invested with the romantic ideal of Ireland throughout his life. This is reflected in his reverent depiction of the swans in "The Wild Swans at Coole." He had a lifelong fascination with Irish folklore, and published his research on the topic in the book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. In some ways, Yeats's fascination with Irish and Celtic mythologies can be seen as a form of Irish nationalism, expressing a romantic fascination with a national ideal that Yeats grappled with throughout his life, as he saw these ideals confronted by reality and worn down by time.
