WB Yeats

[rhys]

Originally Posted by stephenw

Whether he was good at thinking or not is aside the point and impossible to determine. What is clear to me is that he captures some remarkable things in his poetry. That's enough, and more.

Well yes, sure - otherwise he wouldn't be a great poet. But it is only in the poetry that we look for the remarkable things.

[stephenw]

Originally Posted by rhys

Well yes, sure - otherwise he wouldn't be a great poet. But it is only in the poetry that we look for the remarkable things.

Who suggested that anyone look elsewhere ?

[rhys]

Originally Posted by stephenw

Who suggested that anyone look elsewhere ?

I was thinking of the references to Crowley and to the Golden Dawn - to which we might add the stuff suggested by his wife's automatic writing. The danger is that people should suppose the great verse validates belief in all that (though if people want to believe it anyway, fine).

[RonPrice]

W.B. Yeats writes that: "the more a poet rids his verse of heterogeneous knowledge and irrelevant analysis, and purifies his mind with elaborate art, the more does the little ritual of his verse resemble the great ritual of Nature, and become mysterious and inscrutable. He becomes, as all the great mystics have believed, a vessel of the creative power of God."1


My poetry, in contrast, is filled with heterogeneous knowledge, much analysis and has little of the purification that comes from elaborate art. In contrast, too, my poetry is, as far as is possible for me and as much as I can make it, neither inscrutable nor mysterious, but rather simple and straightforward. As to whether I have become a vessel of the creative power of God, I would certainly like to think this is true. But certitude in such a matter goes hand in hand with doubt.–Ron Price with thanks to 1W.B. Yeats in W.B. Yeats: Essays and Introductions, MacMillan, London, 1971(1961), pp. 201-202.


the white light of noon,
the heaviness of woods,
the golden light of dawn,
the redness of sunset and
the place colours, delicate
silence, the low murmurs
of cloudy country days
when the plough is in the
earth and the grey sky
darkening towards sunset:
I would praise all of these
things as I would praise
God in granting me the
hidden gift that has given
rise to all this poetry and
prose whatever its quality,
whatever its mysterious
origins and utterly
inscrutable ending.


Ron Price 8 August 2008