146 years ago today

A poet was born who would change not only the literary landscape of Ireland (and indeed the world) but the historical and political ones as well. He wove the dying myths of the Celts into painfully beautiful plays, poems and stories, creating a body of work so varied it seems unreal it came from one person. Inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites, Romantics and his father's desire for a national artistic movement, W.B. Yeats would become one of the most widely read authors of the last century, and one of the most influential. Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, Joan Didion, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and even Stephen King have all listed him as a inspiration.

He is one of the few poets whose work actually improved as he got older. That isn't to say he was a hack when he was young. Far from it in fact. He seems to be the very pinnacle of Romantic Poetics only to go on to be a mystic poet, historian, political propagandist, Nobel Prize winner and Senator for Ireland in London, which is amazing, considering his teachers told his parents he would never amount to much, due to his extreme dyslexia. He never spoke any language besides English, despite having lived in Paris and gotten much of his source materials from Gaelic myths, which had to be translated for him. Perhaps it is because of these "handicaps" he was able to master the English language and use it as if some strange alchemist, stringing words together as if changing lead into gold. 

For most of my life I have had a very intense relationship with him. No writer has shaped me, my dreams, my ideas, my philosophies more than W.B. Yeats. I feel sorry for any guy I get involved with, knowing they have to share so much of my heart and thoughts with this man who has been dead for 60 years. As I  grow older, find different voices of expressions, I still manage to find him as relevant in my life now as I did when I did when I was 16.  For every mood I have, there is a poem, phase, play, essay, carefully structured political rant from him, expressing it better than I ever could.

So as Ezra Pound would have said, "Happy birthday Old Uncle Billiam". And might I add, thanks for being. The world would be considerably less beautiful without you.