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]

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.