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 four hours north of Portland, the radio flips on
- 2: Re-reading our texts from the strawberry days
- 3: You are just the fingertips of something
- 4: I yield to her cry, losing my own names within me
- 5: Shaking off the echoes of yesterday
- 6: Everything I love is on the table, everything I love is out to sea
- 7: He tried to run away, well, she hit him with a hammer
- 8: There's no combination of words I could put on the back of a postcard
- 9: She's got a common full of love
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- Style: Classic for Refried Tablet by and
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