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

[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.