TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

aw i missed this! i had such an embarrassing yeats obsession as a teenager that i couldn't read him for a while after that. also think he suffers because i know more about him as a dude than shakespeare and yeats was kind of silly.

i mean, shakespeare is the "i want you back" by the jackson 5 of polls, so i would have voted for him, but <3 yeats so ponderous.

For me there is something about Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats that places them above everyone else in the English language. Don't know if I'll feel this way in five years or not...

i like your picks. shelley maybe squeezes in there too imo, but that's based on nothing more than ozymandias really.

Yep, love Shelley.

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

i've been drunkenly reading this several times per day for the last week. fuck

The last two stanzas of "Adam's Curse"!

i've been drunkenly reading this several times per day for the last week. fuck

aww K3v hope you are ok. those lines make me sob even when everything is right in my life, they are the most perfect thing

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 think the pyrotechnics of the earlier parts of the soliloquy get all the attention but this right here is the business

collapses on itself v nicely

thanks to alfred for posting frost's 'desert places.' never read that before; utterly gorgeous.

is there a consensus on the best frost collection to own?

The collected Frost is really one of the rare COMPLETE collections you need own. He only wrote two volumes of fluff (his last two).

we should do more of these

my sophomore HS english teacher had to drive frost to and from the airport when he was in college. he described him as 'the crabbiest old bastard i've ever met.'

SEPTEMBER 1913
by William Butler Yeats
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the ha’pence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save?,
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You’d cry ‘Some woman’s yellow hair
Has maddened every mother’s son’:
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

100th anniversary of publication, and all is changed, changed utterly (not likely)

in the pub, with a friend, he's just gone to drain the weasel, read that while he was away. and well, it moved the hell out of me. time to get a pint.

this is the best thread on ilx

Old ILE's dead and gone
It's with Passantino in the UK

just sent the second coming to a client wanting to know why things don't work as well as they used to. v much looking fwd to response.

should've sent him Lear's last monologue

some guy studying political science barf was introduced to me at a party the other night and the person introducing us said of him "he's very passionate" and i said "but about what" and he said "taking over the world" barf and i said "see, the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity" and he looked perplexed

no response :(

tbh its maybe a tack worth taking more often

I would like us to do this all over again, picking different lines and verses and offerings, I wouldn't even pick on frost this time. we should do it every year, without repeats.

ts big dogs 2014 edition #1: dostoyevsky vs austen

oh yeah def but i meant like for these two itt

today, a cat
THE CAT AND THE MOON

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

HE cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

imagine being so good you can write that for a bloody cat tho

I remember at school, and English was my subject, mind, that sailing to Byzantium was only nonsense, whispers caught in the wind and the odd image of echoing history, a scatty lament, nothing more. read it again tonight and welp

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come

maybe its been mentioned earlier but reading yeats in school i found his delusional sad-sack obsession with maud gonne pitiful and led to some gratuitous bitterness in his poems.

true, yet even unworthy sentiments weren't wasted on him, looking at the outputs he generated from them. even if twere relevant tbh

whenever he writes an empty booming phrase like "the artifice of eternity" he belts me with "Of hammered gold and gold enamelling/To keep a drowsy Emperor awake."

a belt of hammered gold would be alright imo

otm

Yeats really really getting to me lately, like I open and read and am completely drowning within a few lines

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

― max, Monday, May 31, 2010 7:04 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

thread making me think i should give frost another chance

i don't know why i posted upthread about being embarrassed by yeats because i had been obsessed with him as a teenager. teenagers otm.

i would have voted shakespeare but this is really hard.

all otm

got a good compendium of Yeats and yeah maybe I just need my Shakespeare performed for me, cf my hopkins , but nobody reads like Yeats imo

btw, regarding the discussion upthread, dickinson is our american genius, surely? i'm willing to believe frost is better than i know but there's no way he's that good.

She's more "original" in the formal sense.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal

;_;

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show

;_; ;_; ;_;

late Yeats is so raw

I was youtubing poetry to ease the idleness of food preparation yday and I remembered this thread and looked up frost and had a go and the person reading it was an *american* person and I know the fault is in me and the stuff reads well up thread but I had to drop a potful of good roosters just to get to Richard Burton growling something about farms and youth I have some work yet to do with frost I admit

xp raw is a v good word its brutal at times

faw:

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go

raw too

the first poem i ever memorized was "Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty" and i didn't even have to try because the lines

When my arms wrap you round I press
my heart upon the loveliness
that has long faded from the world

just stuck in my head indelibly upon first reading. how does he do that?

Shakespeare was a creep:

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.

all those sonnets that are like, you're super-hot, you should go plow some lady so that your hotness lives on creep me out the worst.

but then there's Lear, so

"Adam's Curse" is the bomb. When I used to teach poetry explaining the narrative to students provoked excellent responses. It has the quiet revelations of a short story but the compression of a great lyric.