OT: Sesquicentenial of Yeats's Birth, June 13

[LionJim]

I came to his poetry late but have been reading him for going on forty years. In my mind he's the greatest poet. He's probably best known for The Second Coming: (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172062)

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."


His was an interesting life, fell in love with Maude Gonne, a confirmed political revolutionary and the most beautiful woman in Ireland. He saw her marry a man he hated, "a drunken, vainglorious lout," who ended up executed by the English after the Easter Rising, when Yeats himself was hoping for a political solution: (From Easter 1916.)

"Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?"

After MacBride was shot, he proposed again, rejected, turned around and then proposed to their daughter (of age). Rejected, thank God. (Their son Sean MacBride was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974.)

He was on the Pro-Treaty side during the Civil War, a harrowing time which brought on some real bitter and nightmarish verse: (From Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.)

"We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as if it were wax in the sun's rays:
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it might outlive all future days.
.....
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,..."

One thing which stands out about Yeats's work is that it got better and more powerful as he aged; his best work came in his fifties and sixties. Even when he was dying, he could come up with stuff like this: (From The Municipal Gallery Re-visited, which he wrote when he was 73, in 1938, the year before his death.)

"You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon:
Ireland's history in its lineaments trace;
Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends."

My favorite of his poems, in my mind his greatest, is The Wild Swans at Coole, written in 1912. It was through this poem that I recognized his greatness, the one that hooked me. My favorite lines anywhere: (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172060)

"Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still."

Thanks for reading. I needed to post this, I'm sure you all understand.

 

[fairgambit]

First of all Jim, congratulations on elevating the discourse on this Board by 1000%. Certainly I'd put Yeats in my top 10 best poets, but not #1. Of course, I never gave it much thought until you raised the subject. Some of my favorites are Walt Whitman, Frost, Poe, Tennyson, Emily Dickinson....I'm sure I've forgotten a few. At one time I read a lot of poetry, and wrote a lot too. Not to brag, but one of my proudest moments was I wrote a poem as a senior in high school and my wife, who was a year behind me and then my girlfriend, called me at Penn State one day and told me the English teacher had read my poem to her class. Ah, I should have kept at it. Instead I became a lawyer and legal writing is the antithesis of poetry. Anyway, thanks for the intellectual post.

 

[PSU Mike]

You mathemagicians sure take a long time to get to the point

 

[LafayetteBear]

Yeats was a wonderful poet, but I slightly favor Coleridge, especially his opium induced Xanadu. The first five lines are flat out iconic:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

 

[Thorndike2012]

WB is in my top 10 as well. I appreciate real passion...particularly men with real passion...in poetry. I would also suggest you read some later stuff; Robinson Jeffers is a favorite. Charles Bukowski is my all time favorite poet. One of his best here:

The Tragedy of the Leaves

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,
the potted plants yellow as corn;
my woman was gone
and the empty bottles like bled corpses
surrounded me with their uselessness;
the sun was still good, though,
and my landlady’s note cracked in fine and
undemanding yellowness; what was needed now
was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester
with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd
because it exists, nothing more;
I shaved carefully with an old razor
the man who had once been young and
said to have genius; but
that’s the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world has failed us
both

 

[step.eng69]

I came to his poetry late but have been reading him for going on forty years. In my mind he's the greatest poet. He's probably best known for The Second Coming: (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172062)