Yeats’ Birthday

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland on June 13, 1865.

See our extensive posting on the occasion of Yeats’ birthday on The Allen Ginsberg Project last year – here

“Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement” – He loved that line! (from “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”)
linking it with the resonant image of Williams“as if the earth under our feet/were/an excrement of some sky..”

Allen, from 1980, transcribed teaching at Naropa:

You can get..perfect lyric matter..out of William Butler Yeats‘ poems, particularly his later poems, so he’s really worth studying. Because he’s the only twentieth-century poet I know who has an ear equal to (Andrew) Marvell or.. myself..or those guys, (Henry) King,  (James) Shirley...rare.  It was rare to find a poet who was writing in rhyme in the twentieth-century that’s really got a good ear….by then, it had become so lax and without muscle, without music, without subtlety of ear, that to find someone who really could do something with stanzas and rhyme is rare. And William Butler Yeats is the one who got it, does it – with a classic, Marvell-like stanza, rhymed stanzas.

Has anyone here studied Yeats very much?  Well, sooner or later in this, or around here, we should get on to his late poems. Because, you see, he was writing nineteenth-century murmurous poetry that had a dying fall and was kind of lax too, and Ezra Pound met him and split his skull open with his intelligence, and said…  And Yeats was shocked that these young modern kids had such a really factual idea of things in poetry. And he picked up from it, and he learned, and he pared down, cut all the fat out of his own rhymes and his own stanzas, and got very modern, from about 1925 on. Once he was…. Pound was Yeats’  secretary, and answered his mail, and worked with him, and they lived together, you know, the families lived together in houses neighboring in Rapallo, in Northern Italy, on the Mediterranean. And Basil Bunting, who was a kid, was also coming down to visit and be acting as secretary. So there was like a group, as there is down here (Naropa), you know, with all the poets hanging out together. But the main lesson that Pound was teaching Yeats was to cut down and pare it all down to active verbs, clear visual picture-stuff and keep…  And the one thing that Yeats taught Pound was, when he was writing verse, he was always to be writing with “a chune in his ‘ead”.

More on Yeats-and-Pound – here  and here
and read Pound-on-Yeats here

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