Literary Influences & Yeats' Early Works

From an early age, W. B. Yeats took little interest in schooling, and his formal education was very inconsistent. Of his early education, he later said, “Because I had found it difficult to attend to anything less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to teach.” When his family lived in London in the late 1870s, Yeats attended a day school in Hammersmith, the Godolphin, with less than stellar results. He was more interested in listening to his father’s friends, mostly painters under the Pre-Raphaelite influence.