W.B. Yeats.

Photograph of William Butler Yeats, poet and co-founder with Edward Martyn and Lady Augusta Gregory of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897. Their ambition was to produce in Dublin 'certain Celtic and Irish plays, which, whatever be their degree of excellence, will be written with a high ambition, and so build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature.' Later in a lecture in March 1903 W.B. Yeats outlined his dream to treat the old Irish legends 'so as to put on the stage types of heroic manhood'. He justified his writing in English as opposed to Irish, as he believed 'we must speak in the language we think in and write in the language we speak in'. Thus giving prominance to beauty and truty as opposed to questions of politics and language.