W.B. Yeats was a legendary Irish poet who became one of the most popular writers in the early 20th-century. Yeats became the first Irishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yeats' epic poetry was inspired by other great poets such as Edmund Spenser, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Wild Swans at Coole is a collection of some of Yeats' greatest poems.