TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

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

Being ignorant of Frost (as most Brits are) I just read a couple of his poems, 'After Apple-Picking' and 'Birches', and while they had a great conversational quality I can't imagine the author of these being the greatest poet of any century, especially not such a dramatic, revolutionary, scary and exciting one as the 20c. yeats certainly engages with a good deal of that in his later work, the earlier stuff is, for me, very hard to enjoy Celtic Twilight guff.
I did my dissertation on Yeats, but I find even his best poetry some what remote now.

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 :(

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).