TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

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.

"Auden for England."

i second that emotion. i should say that i have read a lot more auden than yeats. but this thread does make me want to read more yeats.

"M. Moore's my other, but that's an odd choice I know."

i dig her but sometimes i feel like i'm too slow for her. or i should take a class on her. elizabeth bishop is more my speed.

i need more larkin in my life. he's my kinda guy.

ooh read a bio before you say that

or better, don't

larkin is very, very, very much not my kinda guy, for what that's worth

larkin's my kinda poet. know nothing about him besides.

frost? really?

yeah i meant poetry-wise.

that was more to everyone

what is "two girls in silk kimonos" from? paul muldoon does something with it in 'meeting the british'

the only two poets of the twentieth century who can keep company with frost are yeats and hardy in my opinion, thom, for whatever that's worth. his will specified that his complete poetry always be available at low price; I can't recommend his collected poems strongly enough.

OTHERS taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
My myself in the summer heaven, godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

^^^ the spirituality of America in the 20th century summed up in fifteen lines imo

that's pretty spooky, in a great way

best fifteen-line metaphysical ghost story ever

what is "two girls in silk kimonos" from? paul muldoon does something with it in 'meeting the british'

Muldoon mangles that Yeats poem ("In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz") - "Two girls in silk kimonos, one a gazebo" iirc

I almost mentioned Hardy since when I was in school Hardy, thanks to Larkin and Auden, was hauled into the twentieth century (and he died in 1928); but I always saw him as a 19th century gent whose pessimism suddenly became fashionable post-Waste Land.

i dig her but sometimes i feel like i'm too slow for her. or i should take a class on her. elizabeth bishop is more my speed.

It took years for Moore to get under my skin - she's a really odd mix of clarity and obscurity, really dense observation with intense visual sense, but then will slip off into abstraction or the moral. It feels like she's this very serious, precise artist, and a really commanding poet of syntax, who just doesn't think or see like anyone else in the century. I used to find her wobbling between trivial and impossible tho.

But yeah Bishop is not far behind Moore and Stevens for me - destroys the rest of the (genuinely formidable) mid-century crowd

Larkin is an A1 shit, but v much my kind of poet.

I can't read Frost's "Desert Places" without literally getting a chill:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

But yeah Bishop is not far behind Moore and Stevens for me - destroys the rest of the (genuinely formidable) mid-century crowd

My mid to late twentieth century homies:

Merrill
Bishop
Ashbery
Hecht
Clampitt

muldoon-related xpost: it's in '7, Middagh Street'

'two girls, I thought: two girls in silk kimonos. / Both beautiful, one a gazebo.'

but with a change of speaker between the first line and the second. i did not realise the quote. which is pretty relevant, the quote, there being some role-of-poetry-and-specifically-Irish-poetry-in-world-affairs stuff going on, in the poem.

My mid to late twentieth century homies:

Berryman
Plath
Jarrell
Justice
Dubie

are mine - Dubie may or may not count for jack in the future, and frankly, anybody who shuns meter isn't likely to get read repeatedly by me however much I enjoy his/her stuff on first pass, but his images have been killin me dead for years.

I love Justice too. Jarrell's influence as a critic on me is immense (his one novel is a masterful compendium of one-liners) but his poetry leaves me cold. Where should I restart?

Here is Helen Vendler on Jarrell's poetry.

Jarrell ... can be said to have put his genius into his criticism and his talent into his poetry...

His first steady original poems date from his experience in the Air Force, when the pity that was his tutelary emotion ... found a universal scope...

The secret of his war poems is that in the soldiers he found children; what is the ball turret gunner but a baby who has lost his mother? The luckier baby who has a mother, as Jarrell tells us in "Bats," "clings to her long fur / by his thumbs and toes and teeth... / Her baby hangs on underneath... / All the bright day, as the mother sleeps, / She folds her wings around her sleeping child." So much for Jarrell's dream of maternity...

Jarrell often has been taken to task for his sentimentality, but the fiction, recurrent in his work, of a wholly nonsexual tenderness, though it can be unnerving in some of the marriage poems, is indispensable in his long, tearfully elated recollections of childhood. The child who was never mothered enough, the mother who wants to keep her children forever, these are the inhabitants of the lost world, where the perfect filial symbiosis continues forever...

For all his wish to be a writer of dramatic monologues, Jarrell could only speak in his own alternately frightened and consolatory voice, as he alternately played child and mother...

That pretty much nails it for all the poems of his that I've read or listened to. So maybe the answer is you don't, because he's just like that.

Vendler's terrific. My favorite collection:

http://www.amazon.com/Music-What-Happens-Poems-Critics/dp/0674591534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1275187962&sr=1-1

Jarrell poem whose conclusion gives me the shivers every time, still:

90 North

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,
I clambered to bed; up the globe's impossible sides
I sailed all night—till at last, with my black beard,
My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

There in the childish night my companions lay frozen,
The stiff furs knocked at my starveling throat,
And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling,
Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest.

—Here, the flag snaps in the glare and silence
Of the unbroken ice. I stand here,
The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stare
At the North Pole . . .
And now what? Why, go back.

Turn as I please, my step is to the south.
The world—my world spins on this final point
Of cold and wretchedness: all lines, all winds
End in this whirlpool I at last discover.

And it is meaningless. In the child's bed
After the night's voyage, in that warm world
Where people work and suffer for the end
That crowns the pain—in that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

I reached my North and it had meaning.
Here at the actual pole of my existence,
Where all that I have done is meaningless,
Where I die or live by accident alone—

Where, living or dying, I am still alone;
Here where North, the night, the berg of death
Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,
I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Unfortunately I haven't read enough twentieth century poetry to form my own opinions. I've rad a good amount of Yeats, Eliot, Edward Thomas, Larkin, and though I admired Yeats for his obvious power, I was never sure if the poetry was equal to the rhetoric.

My English teacher, whom I trusted, once told me that the two greatest poets of the 20c were Jack Spicer and Basil Bunting.

Was your English teacher named Hieronymous J. Pisstake, by any chance?

Oh why, you not a fan of their work?

no I'm just being funny 'cause they're good but there are some pretty heavy hitters in contention for the Greatest of 20th C. spot and while I guess I'm open to the idea that either of them, studied closely, are in the company of for example Yeats & Frost....well, no, I'm kind of not. So it seems like poetic challops along the lines of "sure, Shakespeare was good, but he wasn't half the poet Thomas Wyatt was" -- I mean I love Wyatt, a lot, but c'mon

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).