As a cure for those pessimist lyrics, I recommend Wallace Stevens's
masterpiece "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," a sort of manual for the
young warrior of life. Here's a decent reading of the poem. The video
sometimes adds, sometimes detracts from the poem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6ZcqgnC4L0
Eric
On 6/14/2018 1:59 AM, Lawrence Helm wrote:
Yeats was the favorite poet of a friend who when laid off from McDonnell Douglas, borrowed some money in order to make a trip to (I think) Kansas where he was to become the editor of a newspaper there. I liked Yeats poetry but maybe not as much as he did. On the other hand, maybe I read it more carefully than he did. But it has always seemed a mistake to leave the poetry and enter into one of the biographies about him. He was a nutter.
“Sailing to Byzantium” is, I believe, one of his best poems. In order to truly appreciate his poetry at a critical level, one would need to immerse oneself in his spiritualistic beliefs: the séances, the gyres of history – not to the extent one would have to go to accomplish an equivalent thing with Blake’s poetry, but on that order. And I never thought it was worth for either one.
But “Sailing to Byzantium” is a good poem. Yeats was 62 when he wrote it – older than T.S. Eliot who was 29 when he wrote in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Robert is, if I remember right, about two years older than I am which would make him about 86. I’ve thought about the lines from Prufrock recently. I seem not to be as tall as I used to be, and I find that unless I roll the bottoms of my trousers they become tattered from my stepping on them.
Yeats wrote his poem ten years after Eliot wrote Prufrock. A person feeling old might feel with “Byzantium” that any place one happens to live “is no country for old men.”
But in the beginning of stanza II Yeats writes, “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing . . .” Which is what Yeats was still doing at age 62 which used to seem a very old age to me.
Lawrence
*From:*lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On Behalf Of *david ritchie
*Sent:* Wednesday, June 13, 2018 9:49 PM
*To:* lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [lit-ideas] Re: Some words to and from W. B. Yeats, on his 153d birthday
BTW, this might be of interest to those who still believe that Literature arises from context: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/20/books/i-hear-you-knocking.html
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
