WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS WRITES ABOUT HIS BACKWARDNESS IN LEARNING TO READ
T. E. C. Jr. M.D.
That Yeats (1865-1939), the greatest poet to write in English in our time, had difficulty in learning to read may offer hope to parents and teachers faced with children for whom reading is not acquired with ease.
Writing in 1915, this is how Yeats described his slowness in learning how to read:
Because I had found it hard to attend to anything less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to teach. Several of my uncles and aunts had tried to teach me to read, and because they could not, and because I was much older than children who read easily, had come to think, as I have learnt since, that I had not all my faculties. But for an accident they might have thought it for a long time. My father was staying in the house and never went to church, and that gave me the courage to refuse to set out one Sunday morning. My father said if I would not go to church he would teach me to read. I think now that he wanted to make me go for my grandmother's sake and could think of no other way. He was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the readingbook at my head, and next Sunday I decided to go to church. My father had, however, got interested in teaching me, and only shifted the lesson to a weekday till he had conquered my wandering mind.
