TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

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.

when you are old and grey has a slap in it too, tbf

the procreation sonnets are kind of 3rd-tier but I like them as an opening to the semi-narrative of the sequence - like Shakespeare has taken on this weird family politics patronage job where he's trying to persuade a good-looking young aristo to turn out a kid to keep the line up, but then bang sonnet 18 forget about having babies, shakespeare is in love.

the beat drops

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.

In Shakespere's day infant/child mortality was extremely high (I'm thinking around 30%) and life expectancy for those who successfully reached adulthood was still only about 50. Death was very, very real to those people and when they wrote about how fleeting life and love and beauty were, they weren't kidding.

i take seriously that those early sonnets are about mortality. it's the triangulation that's creepy. and interesting, later in the sonnets.

Lines Written on a Seat
on the Grand Canal, Dublin

'Erected to the memory of Mrs. Dermot O'Brien'

O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water, preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully
Where by a lock niagarously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges -
And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb - just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

I'm just gonna, having let that mature, offer aero or whoever their pick against kavanagh, as a way of getting the ball rolling here

Dylan Thomas might make a good match-up.

but then we're heading towards a poetry 6 nations.

nothing wrong with that itd keep the yanks out (not that they'd respect it but no harm setting a stall out maybe)

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.

― horseshoe, Monday, 1 September 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I look out for this paperbk ed of the sonnets, intro by Germaine Greer.

feel like Kavanagh/D Thomas/Ted Hughes might be an interesting stand-off (great but not dominant-great, like Yeats or someone), but I'd be uncertain of a Scottish poet to throw in the mix (I think MacDiarmid is too heavy a hitter for them, or his major achievements are more long-form maybe, and then I'm no good on the next step down, like MacCaig and Morgan) & then I wouldn't know at all to pick a French or Italian poet - it'd be names from a hat for me tbh.

Berryman/Plath might be an interesting head-to-head.

I dont think there are any bad ideas there tbh I just like reading ilx poetry hedz thrash it out also I think maybe Kavanagh needs some spotlight

is there a good selection of Yeats' best lyrics? I'm reading through the Collected in full, & there's a lot in the early volumes that seems... unnecessary

then again, it could just be the actual formatting that's throwing me: giant font + poems starting in midpage = the shorter, pithy stuff tends to get lost in the shuffle; combine that with the frustrating similarity of the titles & I end up rereading a whole volume of poems because I can't spot the ones I liked when I'm paging through :/

the recent separate issue of 'the tower' is nice

yeah I've got that & 'The Winding Stair' in separate volumes (nice cuz they're both good books & the covers are pretty). would love to see this get the same reissued-facsimile treatment:
http://www.themargins.net/images2/bib/B/BL/BL17_228.jpg

ooh, i didn't know there was another one of those

Depends. How are you defining "early"? No Yeats is complete without "The Sorrow of Fergus" and "Adam's Curse."

you referring to "Fergus and the Druid" or another poem? definitely "early", but perhaps a "dramatic fragment" rather than a "lyric"...

"Adam's Curse" = early-middle Yeats?

I've been reading Harold Bloom's Yeats study in tandem with the Collected, & he draws the line right at the turn of the century, which is convenient; but unlike Bloom, I find much to admire in the 'middle poems' of Responsibilities (1914) & The Green Helmet (1910). I'm somewhat less charmed by 1904's In the Seven Woods, so it's simple enough to shunt that one off to the early track.

rosenthal's 'selected poems and four plays' is the standard, right, or used to be? i feel like i may have been recommended it on this board. this thread, possibly.

i just cant with yeats tho in general

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.