In his eleventh year he received his first formal instruction, at the Godolphin School in Hammersmith, London. Awkward, foreign, and with poor eyesight, he was bullied by other boys and withdrew more into solitary reading and into his sense of Irishness. Late in 1881 the family moved to Howth, near Dublin, and soon after Yeats , began attending the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin, where he daydreamed and read Macaulay, Scott, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Rossetti. He remained an undistinguished student but nurtured ambitions to be an artist like his father, with poetry an avocation. As a result he turned aside suggestions that he apply to Trinity College (the likelihood of admission was small) and went instead to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin from May 1884 until April 1886. But while painting perfunctorily, he gave himself up enthusiastically to writing verse drama, writing several plays in the mid-1880s. When he came of age in 1886 (he had moved by then to the Royal Hibernian Academy School to continue art studies), he decided to abandon art and take his chances as a writer. This decision meant leaving Dublin for London, but he would move back and forth between Ireland and England, as professional necessity required, nearly all his life.
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