Le Dickhead Flashcards
Yeats on his burial:
“In a years time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo”
Professor Foster says Yeats:
“Wrote with such an extraordinary energy and radcalism”
Professor Foster on Yeat’s later poems (2 quotes):
“The sense of morality he has infuses them with a kind of grandeur and tragic sense”
“The importance of gaiety in the face of death is a constant theme in the late work”
Yeats of friends:
“My glory was I had such friends”
Terrence Brown said:
“[Yeats] brough great honour on Ireland … [he] showed how poetry enables, helps us to comprehend and survive”
Yeats in his autobiography:
a poet “is never a bundle of accidents and incoherence that sits down to breakfast, he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete”
Yeats on virility
had a partial vasectomy to restore potency
he belived virility was an integral part of his poetic gift
Four quotes from Auden’s In Memory of W.B Yeats
“The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living”
“You were silly like us; your gift survived it all”
“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”
The Wild Swans at Coole (1)
When Yeats first stayed at Coole Park he was involved in a “miserable love affair, that had but for one brief interruption absorbed all my thoughts for years past, and would for some years yet”
Circus Animals (4)
Yeats said MG “absorbed my thougths for years past, and would for some years yet”
Yeats believed “infinite feeling, infinite battle and infinite repose” were the three things man is always seeking (in a letter to Katharine Tynan).
In his poem Against Unworthy Praise he describes MG as “half-lion half child”
The Wanderings of Oisin (poem)
On Baile’s Strand (play)
Adams Curse (3)
Written the same year MG married MacBride
She wrote about in a A Servant of the Queen
Kathleen Pilcher - MG’s sister
Byzantium (3)
Yeats believed that in Byzantium “religious, aesthetic and practical life were one”
Catheral of the Holy Wisdom
In greek mythology dolphins carried the souls of the dead to the Island of the Blest
Among School Children (5)
He visited a school in Waterford
The Montessori method
Plato’s Symposium
In a letter he called stanza VI a “last curse on old age”
Honey of generation - Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs
Leda and the Swan (2)
Yeats thought the rape of Leda was “the annunciation that founded Greece”
Leda = Virgin Mary
- impregnation of god to mortal
- both pregnancies caused the initiation of a new era
In Memory of Major Robert Gregory (2)
“much falling” = 2 interpretations
- may refer to Johnson’s poem “Mystic and Cavalier” in which he describes himself as “one of those that fall”
- he dies falling of a stool when drunk
“consume … combustible”, in a letter from Henry James, he described the image of dried straw, burning quickly which represents violence. Fire needed for the arts burns sowly.
Thoor Ballylee is the tower
