13/06/2026
Well, that was Yeats Day.
There were swans. There were gyres. There was mild confusion. There were people pretending to understand The Second Coming with the confidence of someone who once wrote a Leaving Cert essay under extreme pressure.
Which is, frankly, the correct spirit.
We joke about Yeats because he can take it. Also because if you cannot make jokes about genius, genius starts getting notions.
But underneath all the occult furniture, romantic catastrophe, impossible yearning and general โman staring dramatically at the horizonโ energy, Yeats matters enormously.
He was Irelandโs first Nobel Prize winner for Literature. He gave the world lines that have travelled far beyond poetry classrooms:
โThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold.โ
โA terrible beauty is born.โ
These are not just famous Irish lines. They are world literature lines. Lines that people reach for when politics breaks, when love hurts, when history becomes unbearable, when something beautiful and dangerous is happening.
He understood yearning better than was probably healthy. โTread softly because you tread on my dreamsโ is famous for a reason, but โone man loved the pilgrim soul in youโ is the line that still catches me by the throat.
And honestly, it is astonishing.
Ireland is tiny. Tiny. You can drive across it in an afternoon if nobody starts roadworks or a conversation. And yet this island has produced one of the most extraordinary literary canons in the world: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney, Wilde, Bowen, Edna OโBrien, Maeve Brennan, Seamus Deane, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Sally Rooney, Louise Kennedy, Paul Lynch, and on and on and gloriously on.
That is why I love The Late Night Writers Club by Annie West so much. It understands something essential: that we can honour genius without polishing it into marble. We can laugh at the dead writers. We can let them bicker, sulk, show off, flirt badly, take themselves too seriously and then not seriously enough.
I think growing up between anglophone cultures, but not going to school here, means I can still feel like an outsider to Irish literary culture at times. And maybe that is why it still knocks me sideways. This seems to be a country that values the spoken and written word deeply. Not solemnly or reverently all the time. Often with slagging, wit, argument, irreverence, exaggeration, and somebody at the back muttering, โAh here.โ
The density of it. The confidence of it. The way poetry is not quite ornamental here. The way a line can enter ordinary speech. The way writers are argued with as if they are relatives who have disgraced themselves at a wedding but still must be fed.
So yes, we gave Yeats a birthday.
We teased him. We quoted him. We made him share space with Joyce in the ongoing custody battle for Irish literary attention.
But we also remembered that he matters.
Difficult, brilliant, infuriating, theatrical, troubling, magnificent Yeats.
Happy birthday, Willie.
Same time next year?
