Famous People with Dyslexia: William Butler Yeats

“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” - William Butler Yeats, poet, Nobel Prize Winner in Literature

William Butler Yeats is one of the most famous poets of all time, but fewer people know of this quote from Yeats Autobiographies: "My father was angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head."

But lest you get a permanent wrong impression of WB Yeats' father, this was also said of him (from Eileen Simpson's wonderful book Reversals):

"When John Butler Yeats finally realized how useless it was to bully his son to rad aloud, when his son was clearly incapable of doing so, the father took over the reading himself. From the time the boy was nine until he was sixteen, father read to son from Macaulay, Scott, Shakespeare, Shelley, Rossetti, Blake- the narrative verse and prose a poet would need to know when he began to write his own verses."

WB Yeats' own recollection of his father's reading times:

"My father's influence upon my thoughts was at its height. We went to Dublin by train every morning, breakfasting in his studio. He had taken a large room with a beautiful eighteenth-century mantelpiece in a York Street tenement house, and at breakfast he read passages from the poets, and always from the play or poem at its most passionate moment."

Below is a video of Yeats reading some of his poems.



The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

For more stories and videos of famous dyslexics, visit Dyslexic Advantage.

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