And dance like a wave of the sea

[sovay]

Even though I have known for years that Yeats died in 1939, I never thought of him in an age of radio, but I just discovered him reading "The Fiddler of Dooney" for the BBC in 1935. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is even more incantatory, to the point where the poet has set his own words almost to music; it's spoken, but it has a tune. I had never heard his voice. Looking for more recordings, I found him in 1936 praising Edith Sitwell, which makes me feel that it doesn't matter if I agree about her poetry specifically, just the fact that he doesn't trash the next generation's poets who smashed the patterns of his old mythologies counts with me. In the continuing absence of the Internet Archive, I could not locate the full text of that radio talk, but I read enough of it to run into the line, "I think profound philosophy must come from terror."

Comments

[larryhammer]

Yeats's The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which he edited in IIRC 1935, is an interesting take on the poetry of the time. (One wonders if that Sitwell praise was part of publicity for it?) He clearly liked several currents of poetry of the time, but there's some ... interesting ... omissions as well. I'd be more specific but I haven't touched it in *mumble-mumble* years and the details are hazy.

[sovay]

Yeats's The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which he edited in IIRC 1935, is an interesting take on the poetry of the time. (One wonders if that Sitwell praise was part of publicity for it?)

It was published in 1936, so it is entirely possible he was on the radio that year to discuss it. The more extensive fragment of the talk which Google Books allowed me to read picks up with him moving on from the Rhymers' Club to the circle of poets around Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon where he had to reverse his opinions on both Thomas Sturge Moore and Edith Cooper, although not as half of Michael Field, but specifically as her own poet. He offers a translation by Frederick York Powell as part of the same revival of balladry as Housman and Kipling and Hardy. When he moves into modernism, he skips the war poets entirely because he thinks they were too close to their subject to write lastingly about it—has the twenty-first century got terrible news for him—but feels they were an invaluable influence on and necessary transitional stage to the important modern poets such as Auden, Spender, MacNiece, and Cecil Day-Lewis. He really does seem to love Sitwell and acknowledges Eliot as a stylistic revolutionary without apparently thinking very much of the content of his poetry, but also singles out Walter J. Turner, Dorothy Wellesley, and Herbert Read as overlooked modern poets who he feels share the prevailing existential mood and that's all I can get out of Google Books. tl;dr if the radio talk represents his views on the state of poetry in 1935–6, I should probably get around to reading The Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

[larryhammer]

singles out Walter J. Turner, Dorothy Wellesley, and Herbert Read as overlooked modern poets

Oh interesting. I should dig up my copy of OBMP and see how they're represented. I think I know which bookcase it's in ...

[sovay]

Oh interesting. I should dig up my copy of OBMP and see how they're represented. I think I know which bookcase it's in ...

Please report back! Yeats was correct that his audience in the sense of me did not know very much about those three poets.

(I would have encountered Turner and Read in Louis Untermeyer's Modern British Poetry, which I inherited from my grandmother in a 1942 fifth edition combined with the sixth edition of Modern American Poetry, but I don't think I had encountered Wellesley before Yeats' quotation from her "Matrix." She isn't even in my 2014 Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology.)

[larryhammer]

Hmph -- I can't find it. I suspect it got culled a few years ago, for space. I kept Auden's Oxford Book of Light Verse and both editions of Q's OBEV, but Yeats isn't showing up ...

[sovay]

I kept Auden's Oxford Book of Light Verse and both editions of Q's OBEV, but Yeats isn't showing up ...

I shall repair to the libraries.

[gwynnega]

I had heard his reading of "Innisfree" before, but it was a treat to hear it again.

"I think profound philosophy must come from terror."

That's quite a line.

I keep meaning to read more Sitwell. Recently I was fascinated to discover that Plath (who I knew to be a huge Yeats fan) was deeply into Sitwell's work.

[sovay]

I had heard his reading of "Innisfree" before, but it was a treat to hear it again.

I was almost as hung up on his accent as on his style of reading—both I think have gone out of fashion. I've heard actors' voices like it.

That's quite a line.

Like you take a step sideways and there's Rilke.

I keep meaning to read more Sitwell. Recently I was fascinated to discover that Plath (who I knew to be a huge Yeats fan) was deeply into Sitwell's work.

I didn't know that! I wonder if that's how Plath found her. For years I just knew Sitwell as the source of the text for Britten's Canticle III: Still falls the rain (1954). And my grudge against her for being snarky about Housman, even knowing that was kind of her critical shtick.

[larryhammer]

Like you take a step sideways and there's Rilke

I know, right?

[asakiyume]

I listened to "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and see what you mean about the musicality of it! Nice! (I also laughed at "It is the only poem of mine which is very widely known"--no longer the case, Mr. Yeats, no longer the case! I'd say if there's a poem nowadays that everyone knows, it's "The Second Coming"--even if they don't know him as the author.)

[sovay]

(I also laughed at "It is the only poem of mine which is very widely known"--no longer the case, Mr. Yeats, no longer the case! I'd say if there's a poem nowadays that everyone knows, it's "The Second Coming"--even if they don't know him as the author.)

That's probably true! I wonder when the shift occurred.