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Monday, May 17, 2004

As I said a week or so back, I've been reading Yeats after years of avoiding him. He's so good at what I almost want to do I get sucked into doing that instead of what I really want to do, like an strange attractor in the solution-space of a chaotic function—you can see it, or at least I'm afraid you can, in that last poem I posted here.

He really was a lunatic, and his cracked philosophy ruins many poems: "The Phases of the Moon" is plain awful. And beyond that, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on technically in his poems. For example, here's the first stanza of "Remorse for Intemperate Speech":

I ranted to the knave and fool,
But outgrew that school,
Would transform the part,
Fit audience found, but cannot rule
My fanatic heart.

That last line is a refrain, and Yeats remarks "I pronounce 'fanatic' in what is, I suppose, the older and more Irish way, so that the last line of each stanza contains but two beats." Where else is apparent prosodic looseness just an artifact of dialect? How many half-rhymes for me were full-rhymes for him?

But "Words for Music Perhaps," which includes the Crazy Jane poems, and "Among School Children," and "Lapis Lazuli" … oh my heart.

I think tonight I'll watch the episode where they bury Buffy's mother instead of reading any more.


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