TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

I think I've read Yeats more often for pleasure, and as a high school senior and college freshman I was utterly intoxicated by "Among School Children," "Lapiz Lazuli," "The Statues," "No Second Troy," "Long-Legged Fly," and at least a dozen others.

Shakespeare will probably walk this poll easy but consider among others this:

The Magi

NOW as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Also: his late period flowering, while awesome, has too long eclipsed his terrific earlier work.

that last line is one of the most incredible feats of language I know of - continually, permanently humbling

here is where I shamefully admit I have never read any Yeats except perhaps one or two poems in passing (and never of my own volition)

also, his line about "the fascination of what's difficult" nicely summarizes my attraction to the difficult later work; their difficulty was itself attractive to the young Soto.

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth,
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on the street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

oh MAN.

man oh man.

:)

Dammmmmmmmmmmmmmm tough. Shakespeare is GOAT, the inescapable, most ridic show of wtf genius to turn up in English – I mean look around 1600, what the hell else is like the sonnets, Hamlet etc?

But then I've spent way longer just fixated on Yeats – emo youth hung up on the early verse, his middle-late period always there, studied and picked at, in my 20s; and still the c20th man I come back to as embodiment of the mystery of poetry - he was silly, strange and dislikeable; a list of his beliefs would look absurd; and yet untouchable verse.

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams -
Some vague Utopia - and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful.
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.

Was just thinking about spending some serious time on Yeats last weekend. Going back through the poetry and plays, reading the Roy Foster biog.

Autobiographies is one of the strangest, most magical books I've ever read.

oblig; never gets any worse either

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

this is one of those threads where I point at myself and go "lol CS guy"

this is one of those threads where I go 'lol I wasn't cast in 3 Yeats poems' and get SB'd by about 15 ardent Yeats fanboys

I plead fire, water, air and dirt / fukkin magnets / how do they work?

I will stan for W.B. Yeats any day of the week. He was at or near the pinnacle of the 20th century, which was a hell of a century for poetry in English.

But, the other Willie gets my vote. Shakespeare could write emo, write tragedy, write comedy, write allegory. You name it, he wrote it and it still stands up after 400 years. Try that yourself and see how far you get. I mean, you need a commentary by a specialist to dig the mummified jokes out of Aristophanes, but you can send just about anyone to see A Midsummer Night's Dream and they'll laugh like a hyena.

NOW as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

ronnie james dio r.i.p.

you need a commentary by a specialist to dig the mummified jokes out of Aristophanes,

this is not true of my beloved Plautus btw

Rome ftw

virgil vs shakespeare would be more apt, yeats I'd line up vs willim garlos cilliams maybe? hmm.

My hard drive is named Apemantus.

naw lj I disagree. Yeats's only proper company is with the biggest hitters there are. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Propertius, maybe Vergil, really hard to think of Vergil in anybody's company except Homer imo

virgil smokes homer ten ways to byzantium

The only poets writing in English that rival Yeats in the first half of the century: Frost and Stevens.

I'd consider WCW a huge hitter, personally, although I'm probably very biased.

If we're drawing up a canon of stone-cold greats I think there should be at least one American in there. I'd also really REALLY want to put GMH in too, but again that's completely subjective.

Not read any Propertius; would definitely dust off my Latin if he's as good as you say.

Favourite Greek writer = well, this is Favourite Tragedian really. Did we poll them? Euripides vs Sophocles, although we've probably got an Aeschylus contrarian somewhere up in this thang

Don't actually know any Frost. Am very glad nobody has mentioned TS Eliot yet. Dude's a little overrated IMO.

ffs even I know Frost

"The Most of It" rivals late Yeats in the chills department:

He thought he kept the universe alone;
for all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
in the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the great water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush--and that was all.

One of my favorite Stevens poems, "The Plain Sense of Things":

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

shakespeare

virgil smokes homer ten ways to byzantium

― acoleuthic, Tuesday, May 25, 2010 3:23 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

bullshit!

gonna start that poll after the greek tragedians one is over i think

are there translations of homer, virgil etc to look out for? I've never read either, to my shame

I think I'm probably biased in favour of Virgil because I've studied and fully understood the original Latin to a minute degree, whereas the Homer, although I have studied it in Greek, didn't connect quite so well in the original language.

More Yeats: "Adam's Curse". Note the cadence, its mastery of the demotic. Surprisingly my students love it.

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world."
And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, "To be born woman is to know --
Although they do not talk of it at school --
That we must labour to be beautiful."
I said, "It's certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam's fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough."

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.
I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

This is totally impossible btw - c1600 (Henry IV pt I - Anthony and Cleopatra) Shakespeare feels as close to some sort of godlike as it's possible to get, but at the opposite end of the spectrum, tho on the same level, Yeats sits close to the heart.

I'd probably choose The Circus Animals' Desertion as a favourite, partly because it makes no sense without all his poetry, his magical poetry, but also because... (several insertions and deletions later) ach, I can't say why:

Maybe at last, being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart ..

It could in fact be a lost Shakespeare speech - Prospero looking at his broken staff in a state of denuded humanity.

Keep up your bright swords or the dew will rust them, for this one I think. (voted Shakey fwiw)

ws

If we're drawing up a canon of stone-cold greats I think there should be at least one American in there.

Yeah, it's Frost, head and shoulders above all the other Americans imo - not iconoclastic or school-of-poetry-leading. Just the best at writing poetry from this country, imo.

If we're drawing up a canon of stone-cold greats I think there should be at least one American in there.

ha i don't see why necessarily.

(i don't really know anything about poetry tbh)

I'm just wondering what's going to happen when I eventually bring up Maya Angelou

She's going to fart in your face.

Frost is taken for granted because he's so popular (one of my most prized possessions is a kids anthology of Frost poems my mom bought me in eighth grade). But the man's work is swathed in darkness.

Frost probably just doesn't reach Britain. It's odd. His stuff is pretty good as I can see

And his reputation was first made in England!

this is really weird, like a decade-long blind-spot

Frost is close after Whitman and Stevens.

Frost probably just doesn't reach Britain.

Not a lot I guess. But Glyn Maxwell decided to follow him.

Impossible to make a case against either, but Yeats, for me, mastered language and cadence to an extent I find it difficult to believe even with the words printed in front of me.

Frost probably just doesn't reach Britain.

It's a bit complicated because of the Frost/Edward Thomas thing maybe? Mates and style buddies, so our (Britishes) last A1 pre-modernist shares a lot of inflections with Frost – they're like a pair of poets who write incredible plainish formal verse about absences, dead ends, strange pauses, empty spaces. And Frost gets a bit dull to me after those first three unbelievable volumes - flat, folksy, rather than the what-was-that of eg The Mountain. But the cultural heft really doesn't carry across - don't think he's ever been a popular/ist poet here.

I would take Stevens as my top US poet of the century - probably said elsewhere I'm not a Make-It-New Pound/WCW man, and Wallace S is precise, sonically astonishing and able to take you out into depths. Sings and thinks. M. Moore's my other, but that's an odd choice I know.

Auden for England.

Still not sure how I want to vote here. Leaning Shaks.

and Frost gets a bit dull to me after those first three unbelievable volumes

It's true, but check out the volume A Further Range.

This thread has made me really happy -- and persuaded me to reach for the top of my bookshelf for Yeats and Stevens.

We should start a thread in which we name our favorite 20th century poets.

I agree, for a start that would be a better option than using the thread where we explain why Yeats > (just) Shakespeare

are there translations of homer, virgil etc to look out for? I've never read either, to my shame

― cozen, Wednesday, May 26, 2010 4:45 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

for homer, fagles is the most recently celebrated one. but I've read robert fitzgerald's translation of the odyssey and prefer it to the fagles - fagles is a little too modern & poetic.

for virgil, I'm a fan of the allen mandelbaum. track down the copy w/ illustrations by barry moser.

Responsibilitie would be my cutoff point, and I'd include several of its poems.

That Bloom book is excellent on among other things Yeats' indebtedness to Shelley.

xp yeah I was just looking at the Rosenthal... it's still like 300 pages tho! & I already have all the plays

I feel like my appreciation of a poet depends heavily on my ability to carry a book around with me for several weeks, reading & rereading during my little snatches of downtime. pocket-sized facsimile editions of The Tower & The Winding Stair have made some inroads towards the later Yeats, but if I want to dip into The Wind Among the Reeds I'm stuck lugging around a 600-page brick :/

are you reading this thread on a printout?

who says he wants to appreciate us

... well now that you mention it, I do appreciate that counter-zing on my behalf :)

it wasn't a zing I'm trying to shock u into happiness get a kindle

no thanks, I'm a sentimental traditionalist & a champion of conservative values (I'm reading Yeats ffs)

this is the same Yeats with the tombshagging and the whatnot now

Better still, hand the Yeats-loaded Kindle to a gifted reader-aloud of poetry and have them insinuate the words into your brain through your ears. That way you needn't encumber your hands and may even close your eyes restfully.

think of how many monkey testicles you'd be able to afford thanks the savings a kindle brings

The benefits are endless.

interesting that nobody talks abt shakespeare ITT anymore, interesting and telling imo Yeats in the long run at a canto imo

shakespeare in a first round KO thx

Yeats after the fall

ive had the first four lines of wild swans at Cooke in my head all day idk why.

how do the rhythms even work. idk.

anyway, 150th bday this week rte running a course of events across TV and radio to look fwd to

how do the rhythms even work. idk.

Yeats employed a superb bassist

How do I shot Yeats through guitar amp?

giving yis both a dry downturning mouth rn

On R3 also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05xq6b0

Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

God almighty

√

interesting that nobody talks abt shakespeare ITT anymore, interesting and telling imo Yeats in the long run at a canto imo

― post you had fecund thoughts about (darraghmac), Thursday, April 9, 2015 11:39 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*folds arms, raises eyebrows at shakespeare*

no way of comparing...

i was gonna read Deidre, one of the plays, this week.

I'm easily riled but It's been a while since I've seen something that's riled me this much. This is an object lesson on hot to not read a great poem. And how to dress badly to boot. What on earth is she doing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0VuBD-yxVI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPB_17rbNXk

I've already had that misfortune^. Not the whole thing, obviously.

"Watch this video on youtube. Playback on other sites has been disabled by this owner"

Think I've seen Shaw read Shakespeare on TV. That's when you know your voice is the best voice.

I know not what the younger dreams --
Some vague Utopia -- and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.

I read a page of a yeats short story aloud yesterday and jeez there was a guy who needed the breaks forced onto him. Rhythm and cadence was there but sentences were running sevenclause deep.

yet his Autobiographies is beautiful, and so is a meditational reverie called "Per Amica Silentia Lunae."

I dont doubt it, the 'aloud' part was what caused me the problems.

anyone read yeats' plays? the collection i've got has "calvary" and "purgatory"

Yes. Read The Words Upon the Windowpane for realistic drama, Purgatory in his spare Noh phase.

oh these are super short too

A Deep-sworn Vow

OTHERS because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.

ughhhh

stop soul-reading me, WBY

WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Always enjoyed the hints of malice/goes in that one

/glee

The entire social concept of friendzoning justified in the most beautiful whines imaginable

The leaden echo and the golden echo is the best poem

the boss just made a reference to "the second coming", you know the "slouching towards bethlehem" bit. "we've all been slouching towards bethlehem a little bit". it wasn't an allusion that was cleaving closely to the original - she was emphasizing the slouching towards something, there was no hint of apocalypse. a co-worker piped in "that was christmas"

haha

Dreamt recently I made an illustrated small book of Wandering Aengus which ended with the Flammarion engraving for the final 2 lines.

“I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,
For people die and die
And after cried he, “God forgive!
My body spake, not I!”

This one is a bit cheesy but it does remain one of the few poems I still know by heart (and can rattle off primary school style too).