Olivier-Eugène-Prosper-Charles Messiaen was born on December 10 in 1908 at Avignon, France, into a literary family. He was the elder of two sons of Cécile Sauvage, a poet, and Pierre Messiaen, a teacher of English from a farm near Wervicq-Sud who translated the plays of William Shakespeare into French. Messiaen's mother published a sequence of poems, ("The Budding Soul"), the last chapter of ("As the Earth Turns"), which address her unborn son. Messiaen later said this sequence of poems influenced him deeply and he cited it as prophetic of his future artistic career.