Our Life in Six Lyrical Poems: William Butler Yeats June 11, 2007 7:00 PM The Philoctetes Center Levy: Welcome to the final episode of Our Life in Six Lyrical Poems, which was scheduled to coincide with the final episode of the Sopranos. That’s said for the benefit of Tara Moran, who is a great friend of ours and a great fan of the Sopranos. I’m very happy to introduce Mike Braziller, who will in turn introduce our distinguished guest, who is returning to the final session of the Philoctetes Our Life in Six Lyrical Poems. He also presided and was a guest at the first session on the poems of Hardy. Braziller: Thanks. That’s a perfect symmetry, beginning with Hardy and now—actually, when I envisioned this whole program, I was thinking Hardy, Yeats, Hardy, Yeats. We’re planning an ambitious schedule for next year. I will introduce Eamon now and he will read, I believe, two of his own poems at the end of the evening. I’m definitely looking forward to that. Eamon Grennan is from Dublin. He was educated at the University College in Dublin and Harvard, where he received his PhD. He has taught for many years at Vassar College, where he is the recently retired Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English. He’s published seven volumes of his own poetry, both in Ireland and the US. His Leopardi: Selected Poems won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 1997. He has published numerous essays and reviews. His poems appear regularly in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, including Poetry, Poetry London, The New Yorker, The Nation, New Republic and many others. He’s received rewards from the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Still Life with Waterfall received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 2003, and his most recent collection of poems is The Quick of It. He recently publishes a translation, with his partner Rachel Kitzinger, of Oedipus at Colonus. He lives in Poughkeepsie and the west of Ireland. Okay, William Butler Yeats. Grennan: Okay. They’re waiting. People are waiting. Everybody got seats? Okay, so this is going to be a little while, because trying to pack Yeats into an hour and a half—you know, Yeats is like trying to pick up dust with a fork. He’s impossible to contain. The tiny piece of life I might offer just as a sort of brief introduction—you probably know the trajectory of Yeats’s life and work, and the extraordinary richness and vitality and variety which it represents both on the Irish stage, first, of course, and then the larger European stage, and then the world stage. Given Yeats and his occult engagements, the other world stage, which he’s no stranger to at all, as you probably know from reading things like A Vision and many of the poems themselves. Born 1865, became a poet, became passionate about his poetry very, very early. His landscapes are Sligo in the west of Ireland, London, and Dublin. His father was a painter, J.B. Yeats—John Butler Yeats. His brother was a painter, Jack B. Yeats. He learned an awful lot from his father’s impassioned aesthetics and his resistance to forms of tired Victorianism. Yeats himself began as a pre-Raphealite in some ways. You know, a lot of those poems had been written in the ‘80s. His first book is in the ‘80s, and his last book is in the late ‘30s. So he spans a good 50 years of Our Life in Six Lyrical Poems: William Butler Yeats Page 2 active, productive life with his work. And it moves, and we’ll talk a little bit about this as we go, because that’s part of the point when you get to Yeats. You talk about changes, and you talk about a poet engaged to the degree he is with, as he says himself, remaking himself constantly, never standing still. For me, certainly, Yeats is a kind of model of the poet career, as he is for lots of other people, not that you want to imitate him. His voice is entirely his own, and if you did try you’d fall on your face, among other things. He’s not to be imitated, but he is to be admired, up close and from far off. As well as his landscapes, there were his loves. Maud Gonne—the commitment of a lifetime passion beginning in 1889 and ending in 1939. He also loved, incidentally, as we will hear in one of the poems, Maud Gonne’s daughter, whom he also asked to marry him. And another great love of his was, early on, Olivia Shakespeare, who became the mother of Dorothy Shakespeare, who married Pound. And then of course Yeats lived with Pound for a while, and the whole interaction of Pound and Yeats is a fascinating topic in itself. One could go on about it. Aside from the poetry and all the books—I’ll just name the books and then I’ll end this little introduction. Crossways in 1889; The Rose in 1893. The Wind Among the Reeds was a kind of major step forward beyond, one would call it, the kind of high aestheticism, the rather ‘90s aestheticism of The Rose and Crossways. Wind Among the Reeds is a book of love poems, kind of like a Petrarchan book. It’s amazing—1899, so it’s a ‘90s book too, but it’s the end of something clearly. He has a couple of what we’d call transitional books in 1904 and 1910, full of dejected love poetry among other things. In 1903 Maud Gonne got married, and not to Yeats, but to a man called John McBride, whom Yeats politely called a drunken, vainglorious lout in verse. And then McBride had the good manners to be shot in 1916, as one of the leaders of the revolution. Yeats had to alter himself a little bit and sing him into the story as well. Yeats’ capacity for change is one of the things we may talk about, I think—change of attitude, change of understanding, change of vision, and, of course, change of form, change of language, really. The great transition book, or the great breakthrough book, is probably in 1914, and remember what happened in 1914, so it’s a pre-war book, or a wartime book—just as the war starts. It’s called Responsibilities, and you can hear from a poem—titans like The Wind Among the Reeds or The Rose, and then Responsibilities—that you’re going to be dealing with a very different poet. You’re going to be dealing with a very different language. We’ll see a little bit of that. The Wild Swans at Coole dates 1919. And then the great other, probably the pinnacle, the summit, the battlements of Yeats’s work is The Tower, of which we’ll do the central poem, the title poem, which appeared in 1928. The next book is also connected with The Tower, which Yeats bought—we’ll go on about that— in the 1920s. No, in 1917 he bought the tower, but the next book is called The Winding Stair and Other Poems, and that was the stair inside the tower, and I might have something to say about that, too, later. Then The Wild Old Wicked Man becomes in the later poems at points writing of extraordinary radical passion and indifference and anger, and then in books like Words for Music, perhaps, or A Full Moon in March, and then, finally, Last Poems, which he lived to finish the poems, but not to see the final organization, because it comes out in ’39. The other thing that he was involved in, obviously, is that he wrote theater. I mean he started in the theater, and Yeats is at the heart of what’s called the Irish Revival, the Irish sort of Renaissance, the Irish Literary Renaissance or Irish Literary Revival. And in some ways he’s it. Transcript prepared by RA Fisher Ink, LLC +1 718-797-0939 / 800-842-0692 [email protected] Our Life in Six Lyrical Poems: William Butler Yeats Page 3 And in some ways it is a movement that takes place parallel to the great movement in Ireland at the time for a national identity. So here is this cultural force establishing cultural identity, while political identity is trying to be established, and it’s finally established in 1922, when Yeats becomes, after the treaty, after the civil war, a senator. Around the time of the civil war he becomes a senator. So he straddles worlds—theater, poetry, the occult. The book called The Vision—we won’t go into it very much, but it’s fascinating, and he says it’s a metaphor for his poems and it’s connected with his wife’s habit of manic writing. He is in the political realm. But above all he’s a lyric poet. I think that’s what we love about Yeats, what we find enduring about Yeats, aside from the playwright, aside from the political force, aside from the cultural energy, aside from the occult magician. A couple of great biographies, or volumes of biography, by Roy Foster—one called The Apprentice Mage, and The ArchPoet, and you can hear in those too the kind of feel of Yeats as a supremely hieratic figure. For me, however, it isn’t so much the hieratic as the fact that this is a poet whose poetry kept pace with his life at every inch of the journey.