
W.B. Yeats
From In the Seven Woods. The Irish poet was in his thirties when he wrote this short verse, though it was not, even then, his earliest work concerned with growing older. “My first denunciation of old age,” he later wrote to Olivia Shakespear, came “before I was twenty.” In 1922, when the Irish Free State was founded, Yeats accepted an invitation to serve in its senate. The following year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.