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: And me? Well, I'm just the narrator
- 2: I'd marry her this minute if she only would agree
- 3: This is what I get for being civilized
- 4: Open up your mouth, but the melody is broken
- 5: Is your heart hiding from your fire?
- 6: Everybody knows the world's gone wrong
- 7: The dusty light, the final hour
- 8: Reading your mind is like foreign TV
- 9: When you turn a solemn promise to a blatant lie
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- Style: Classic for Refried Tablet by and
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