TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

Looking at that 'For Once, then, Something', is this mean to be so gauche? 'And lo'? 'Truth'?
I know Lo is meant to make us think of 'low' but its pretty laughable. The repetition of words
is effective, i grant.

please do continue to provide us with the illuminating first looks into Frost

seriously dude, "I just looked at this and I have to say, nope, no sale" - save that for, like, TV shows or something & maybe read a critical appreciation of the poetry?

Seriously, Frogman: read ten or a dozen poems before judging.

and though I admired Yeats for his obvious power, I was never sure if the poetry was equal to the rhetoric

Not sure I agree with this. It does also allow me to correct something I said upthread about Yeats' 'magical poetry' which sounded like a gushing schoolgirl - I meant it actually as poetry about magic, rather than in the sense that poetry can be magical, although I think that's true in all sorts of cases.

Point being, I think that Yeats consistently finds something ineffable and beautiful from the mystical bric-a-brac, his prosaic, silly side. Do you find the arcane symbolism of The Tower gets in the way of 'O heart, O troubled heart'? Or all that crap about gyres? While not quite seperable, they are strangely unimportant, despite clearly being part of Yeats' poetic imagination.

In other words, the poetry (for me) usually wins over any rhetoric.

randall jarrell's criticism is a+++ phenomenal

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

- R. Frost, The Silken Tent

my mid-to-late century homies:

bishop
larkin
ponge
kees
macniece

"The Subverted Flower":

She drew back; he was calm:
"It is this that had the power."
And he lashed his open palm
With the tender-headed flower.
He smiled for her to smile,
But she was either blind
Or willfully unkind.
He eyed her for a while
For a woman and a puzzle.
He flicked and flung the flower,
And another sort of smile
Caught up like fingertips
The corners of his lips
And cracked his ragged muzzle.
She was standing to the waist
In golden rod and brake,
Her shining hair displaced.
He stretched her either arm
As if she made it ache
To clasp her - not to harm;
As if he could not spare
To touch her neck and hair.
"If this has come to us
And not to me alone -"
So she thought she heard him say;
Though with every word he spoke
His lips were sucked and blown
And the effort made him choke
Like a tiger at a bone.
She had to lean away.
She dared not stir a foot,
Lest movement should provoke
The demon of pursuit
That slumbers in a brute.
It was then her mother’s call
From inside the garden wall
Made her steal a look of fear
To see if he could hear
And would pounce to end it all
Before her mother came.
She looked and saw the shame:
A hand hung like a paw,
An arm worked like a saw
As if to be persuasive,
An ingratiating laugh
That cut the snout in half,
And eye become evasive.
A girl could only see
That a flower had marred a man,
But what she could not see
Was that the flower might be
Other than base and fetid:
That the flower had done but part,
And what the flower began
Her own too meager heart
Had terribly completed.
She looked and saw the worst.
And the dog or what it was,
Obeying bestial laws,
A coward save at night,
Turned from the place and ran.
She heard him stumble first
And use his hands in flight.
She heard him bark outright.
And oh, for one so young
The bitter words she spit
Like some tenacious bit
That will not leave the tongue.
She plucked her lips for it,
And still the horror clung.
Her mother wiped the foam
From her chin, picked up her comb,
And drew her backward home.

that frost stuff is nice, did he continue writing after adolescence?

srsly u yanks are cute.

y u i orta

:D

nah i've not read much frost, it doesn't help that he's thought only in junior poetry/english cycles this side of the ocean tbh

write-in voting for robert burns

there are more heavy hitters polls to come

I know the tradition on ILM would be "let's do twenty polls at once" but I figured let's get this big q out of the way and then continue

Next poll:

English schools
American schools

private or public?

from what I'm told of Ireland I don't think the worst Manchester ghoul will be able to do aught but bow before the masters :(

Finally voted. It was Shakespeare coz yknow he's Shakespeare (OR WAS HE???).

The Frost quoted here not doing much for me tbh - still where I was upthread and mostly hit by the earlier stuff (just reread 'Out, out' and hell yes). This feels woolier, less concrete, and the poet's sticking his head in a bit more; sounds ok, but I feel like I'm in the Graves league (which yes is a place I like to be), not the Yeats true vision league.

It was Shakespeare coz yknow he's Shakespeare

Or rather, he persuaded me right now because of that opaque inwardness that he's got - minds talking to themselves, jumping from image to image, losing you sometimes, picking at and around something and stretching language far to do it. When a Shakespeare contemporary gets difficult, it's often because you're missing an allusion; with Yeats, it's sometimes because he's wandered into private-symbol world (and sometimes it's because he's talking bollocks); with Shakespeare it's like he's thinking and discriminating and turning inwards - like he (in the sonnets) or a character are in an difficult argument with themselves (mid-late drama especially - Corialanus, Timon), stepping s'ways, skipping ahead, cutting back, reacing for images to articulate it.

There are bits of that around him in Fulke Greville and Donne maybe (the latter a gen down, so picking it up from the playhouses?), but it's never really allied elsewhere to such a straight-up prettypretty lyrical gift.

Anyway that is why I voted Shakespeare today.

I also admit that everything I'm praising could just be textual corruption.

It was very difficult for me to vote for Shakespeare given how much some of Yeats means to me. "But I, being poor, have only my dreams/I have spread my dreams under your feet/tread softly for you tread on my dreams"? All love poetry after that might as well go hang, that's as good as it's going to get. But then, you know, Will S.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!
Fool. O nuncle, court holy-water in a dry house is better than this rain-water out o’ door. Good nuncle, in, and ask thy daughters’ blessing; here’s a night pities neither wise man nor fool.
Lear. Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.

I mean

you know

lol at ppl shitting on robert frost

shakespeare is so ridiculous

ly amazing

xxp do you file that thought under comedy, poetry or scat porn, though?

passive-aggressive finickiness disguised as wit

nah i cut all the pass-agg out of my diet tbph, but this is the shakespeare/yeats poll and frost will have his due consideration soon, i look fwd to more exposure.

that frost stuff is nice, did he continue writing after adolescence?

srsly u yanks are cute.

― May be half naked, but knows a good headline when he sees it (darraghmac), Sunday, 30 May 2010 14:51 (8 hours ago) Bookmark

haha

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i'm literally perning in a gyre with excitement

Mid-late-20th-Century:

Sceptr'd Isle

MacNeice
Larkin
Hill

God's Country

Stevens
Merrill
Berryman
Ammons

My favorite Merrill poem. The last stanza kills me.

I mean

you know

For Lear WS needed almost superhuman self-control. For all his gyres I don't think Yeats could go there.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

this is no country... for yeats!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

^^^^ mods, plz change thread title

nu-Shakespeare could be posting to Tumblr rite now -- would we know it? O_O

They knew it then, we'd know it now.

Didn't vote but I followed the arguments and while I sensed a lot more affection for Yeats I knew (and so did everybody) that it wasn't going to be enough.

thread took moral high ground of recognising greatness of both rather than turning it into a flamewar contest.

that was aerosmith's intention though

Nah -- we used it as an excuse to post great poems.

well it transpired as Robert Frost Is Awesome but yeah, great thread

I spent a fair amount of drive time today thinking about what to make heavy hitters poll #2 - what's anybody wanna do?

dare we approach Virgil's rostrum

*I* would be down for something involving GMH but I'm aware I'm pretty much alone on that. Go with your gut, dude

Thomas Hardy vs D.H. Lawrence

virgil vs dante

or homer vs milton

Flaubert vs Nabokov