W. B. Yeats : A Life Volume I: The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914

I find authors' & poets' lives almost more interesting and inspiring than their works and love reading bios of them. Yeats is very deep, but generally discernable, unlike Ezra Pound, the American poet whose youth was contemporaneous with Yeats' middle to old age but who I always at least used to find so unapproachable. The most popular two poems of his often found in anthologies--"Sailing to Byzantium" and "The Second Coming" (which sounds so prescient today) are great. He was in the world as a popular politician but, strangely, not "of it," his muse and continual unrequited love was the lovely famous actress Maud Gonne, he became friends with Madame Blatavasky of the Theosophical Society and drew upon the deep well of Celtic folk show more culture. Oh well, you can look it all up.

If you possess a Celtic soul he will surely speak to that if you open it. From my forays into Yoga and QiGong/Taoism I realized I should look to my own mystical culture of the Celts, every bit as spiritual as the Chinese and the Indians (Amer and Continental). He was not a burn-out like some of the Beats and the Romantics like Byron & Shelley or the likes of Hart Crane and Poe here in the States. Plath and Dylan Thomas for sure, each wasting their selves in their own ways. A survivor, who, at my age, I increasingly revere, having hitherto dug the burn-outs.

Would poetry be deemed so important today. But we have more ways of disseminating ours and reading others today than ever. Perhaps John Mellencamp's vision of "a million young poets screamin' out their words" in his "Little Pink Houses" (I'm a Hoosier) is now realized, and this is the "maybe someday their voice will be heard." But it is all so obviously and befuddingly diverse. We do indeed live in interesting times. A blessing or a curse? show less