Yeats

Big fan of Mussolini, W.B. Yeats. I just feel like we don't talk about that enough.

>>9632098
Wtf, I hate national narratives now

>>9631965
How can you read The Second Coming and Byzantium and not think that's the tightest shit?

>>9631965
you kind of have to look beyond his a-rhythmic and relatively unrefined mechanical skill to his mystical finesse and geist to really appreciate him. most people around here love him from the start because they're not experienced enough to notice the former in the first place, but if you're already a familiar reader of poetry you'll have a bit of overcoming to do before you come to terms with Yeats' real genius

>>9631965
I imagine that the collection is for the most part chronological. I intensely dislike his early period. I don't think he gets good until he stops riding the Celtic myth's cock.

>>9631965
french symbolists are leagues above yeats tbqh

>>9632641
He doesn't though - Ben Bulben. Oisin is trash, I agree

>>9632316
His wonky end rhymes and offbeat rhythms are very much intentional and half the pleasure in reading him. He would regularly revise poems that initially sounded "correct" and subtly disrupt their metres, drawing attention to particular phrases, images and sounds. To claim Yeats was technically unrefined is absolute horseshit, he was a master

>>9633040
get the shit off your nose and read a book, moron

>>9633068
Hm, I never thought of it that way before

File: Brendan Gleeson.jpg (21KB, 273x410px) Image search: [Google]

21KB, 273x410px

>>9633068
>>9633099
All me

Meditations in Time of Civil War
An Irish Airman foresees his Death
Leda and the Swan
Whence had they come?
He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven

I'm not very /lit/ but I particularly enjoy these ones. It's the weird rhyming scheme I like, look at the "dreams" "dreams "dreams" in Cloths of Heaven or the "breath", "breath", "life", "death" in Irish Airman.

>>9632098
so was Ezra Pound. Apparently Mussolini was /lit/ af.

>>9632316

"you kind of have to look beyond his a-rhythmic and relatively unrefined mechanical skill"

ummm wat?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
>The alternation of dactilyc and iambic feet here is an astonishing metrical inversion, surely a potent way to begin a poem.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
>the two morphemes con and can form a double accented foot.
>the "re" of "gyre" is reversed in the "er" of the falconer
>suggesting rhyme without rhyming properly
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
>tell me this isn't one of the finest examples of the rhetorical device of genus: balance species: metonymy in the English language 10 000 times and I will not believe you.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And so on and soon.

>>9634103

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

>Here, the parenthetical repetition at the beginning and end of lines emits in an audible hiss, with the proliferation of "s" sounds

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
>Oh look, Jung stole my philosophical notion of a commons of internal garble (World Spirit accessible through automatic writing. . .as Collective Unconscious)
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
>reference to the Shelley poem "Ozymandias" that has a similar tone to his own poem
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
>sphinx, the discoveries made by Egyptologists in the nineteenth century.

There are three stages to Yeat's poetry - his early, middle and late works. Each is distinctive in its own way and may or may not be to your liking. Maybe this playing a role.

How on Earth can you be disappointed by Yeats

>>9632310
I agree the first half of The Second Coming is brilliant and Byzantium is good as well. But they lack a certain kind of warmth and pulse of life which I personally hold to a high standard.
>inb4 having litterary preferences is wrong

>>9632863
I guess i agree.

>>9632316
>>9633040
Reading something for well-placed metrics isn't a good argument for me itself my man.

>>9633724
Thanks! I'll read these.

>>9634103
>>9634156
This is like a husband trying to describe the love of his life, his wife, by referencing to which clothes she wears and what brand her nail polish is.

>>9635222
I don't know my man. I'm confused and that's the reason for this thread.

>>9635532
>because I am too dumb to understand prosody, it is unimportant

>>9632098
Hi Sally!