In his last book, The Ancient Minstrel, Jim Harrison described reading Yeats’ poetry at 18 as being guillotined.
W.B. Yeats died on this date in 1939, at the age of 73. He had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
My personal favorite is "For Anne Gregory," one I’ve kept in my desk drawer since college, with the lines, “Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair.” I take it as a wry reminder of the fallibility of man.
My New Year’s resolution was to read a poem a day from Yeats’ Collected Poems. I keep the book at work, so I haven’t read one every day, but I’m making progress.