TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

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

Albarn vs Gillespie

oh wait I got it now

dickinson vs whitman

oh you already started it

lets get some women up in these polls tho, and by women, i mean, emily dickinson

max OTM iirc

(that poll's impossible to answer, tho)

I was looking at elizabeth bishop & marianne moore this morning, but yeah dickinson is the business

was lucky to have had a prof who was a Dickinson scholar tbh

or, if he didn't publish on Dickinson -- i don't know -- she was definitely one of his favorite poets, if not his favorite, and we did a lot of work on her stuff

I was looking at elizabeth bishop & marianne moore this morning

there's painful choosing. ow.

*I* would be down for something involving GMH

Dickinson v GMH! US/UK shut-ins of the 19th century. (another tough un).

I would guess that Dickinson would be hard to beat by almost anyone - actually Dickinson vs. Donne might be a fair fight

or Dickinson vs Herbert

dickinson vs..... herself

Dickinson v GMH! US/UK shut-ins of the 19th century. (another tough un).

this poll would be amazing and would probably lead to me reading some Dickinson, who like Frost is a massive black hole in British poetic education