W.B.Yeats' 'The Fisherman'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

Who are you writing for? For anyone writing poetry the question seems essential.

At some point in his career Yeats had wanted to be a national poet, writing for and on behalf of his country. But in this poem he renounces that ambition, having, he says, discovered that the people he thought we was writing for and about are not worthy. He renounces them for an imaginary figure, a solitary fisherman. And in the poem’s most memorable image, Yeats hopes that before he’s old, he will have written him one poem ‘as cold/and passionate as the dawn’.

You can spend some time admiring those two adjectives, and the effect they create.

Hugh Kenner suggested the difference between Yeats and Pound, or Yeats and most poets, was that Pound, once he’d left London, could sit in relative isolation at his typewriter in Rapallo telling himself he was a genius and dismissing any rumours of negative response to his work as the sniping of lesser interigences. Yeats, standing in the wings at the abbey theatre was forced to confront an often baffled, sometimes hostile audience. It might be one of the reasons Yeats’ poems got better as he got older.

W.B.Yeats' 'For Anne Gregory'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

A private joke made public? A painful truth? A cruel observation. A neat poem. One of the Intriguing aspects of Yeats’ output is that alongside the esoteric complications and the political and public poems, he could write, and publish something like this.

W.B.Yeats' 'An Irish Airman foresees his death'

W.B.Yeats (1865-1939)

I’ve met several people who identify this poem as the one that switched them on to poetry. So reading it aloud is a daunting proposition. If it’s one of your favourites, and you don’t like my reading, I apologise.

Paradoxically, the poem works so well because although it mentions specific places, you’d never know who the Irish Airman was or in which war he was fighting from the poem alone. It’s this delicate mix of the general and specific, combined with Yeats’ superb phrase making, that makes the poem so effective.

If you’re interested in technique you should compare this poem with its companion piece, ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ written for the same Irish Airman.

W.B.Yeats' 'The Second Coming'

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

‘The best lack all conviction’: It’s not always true, but there are times, like the present, when it does seem accurate. And though Yeats wrote this after the First World War, the poem seems to rediscover its own topicality as each generation faces the baffling reality of its own political system.

I wrote on a previous podcast that Yeats is the unavoidable English language poet. He was so very good at what he did. He wrote better lines, better images, better stanzas and better short poems than almost anyone else, and he did it more often.

Try replacing ‘slouching’ in the final line with a different verb and watch what happens, to both the sound and sense.

If you're interested in Yeats the man, he is the subject of a superb two volume biography by Roy Foster: 'W.B. Yeats a life'. Vol I: The Apprentice Mage, Vol 2 The Archpoet.

W. B. Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium'

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

When i was at school in the 1970s my poetry text book could casually identify Yeats as ‘The Greatest Poet of the Twentieth Century’. If the claim seems premature, given there was a quarter of a century yet to run, changing fashions in academic approaches to poetry in that final quarter meant the claim took a battering. This isn’t the place to point out how limited and limiting those approaches were, but the poems have been resilient.

For me Yeats is the unavoidable English language poet. He was so very good at what he did. He wrote better lines, better images, better stanzas and better short poems than almost anyone else, and he did it more often. He also had the unusual capacity to go on getting better at what he did, thoughout a long writing life.

You can learn a great deal about writing poetry by reading Yeats carefully. But he’s also an enjoyable poet to read. If you have a copy of his collected that prints the poems in chronological order, you can start at the beginning and read through to the end as though you were reading a novel.

There will be much more of Yeats on future podcasts, the real problem he poses is which poems to read.

If you're interested in Yeats the man, he is the subject of a superb two volume biography by Roy Foster: 'W.B. Yeats a life'. Vol I: The Apprentice Mage, Vol 2 The Archpoet.