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."
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- 1: I'll stay out until my mind is like a clear glass
- 2: I make sure there are hidden messages in my work
- 3: The wind is blowing the planes around
- 4: I cannot feel it, the veil of black, a fine spray of white paint
- 5: Pilgrimage, private life, mortality
- 6: My dream house is a negative space of rock
- 7: Your spirit watched me up the stairs
- 8: No, I'll build a cute flower border
- 9: If you don't want the death of the party after I'm gone, sing one for me
- 10: Life, a series of memorials and signals
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- Style: Classic for Refried Tablet by and
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