> From: "david bircumshaw"
>
> suprised that jon corelis sees w.b.yeats as "apolitical"
Rereading my posting I can see how I might not have made this
clear: I meant that Gogarty's poetry was apolitical. His
subsequent reputation has not borne out the high opinion of Yeats,
who called him "one of the great lyric poets of our age" and gave
him a dozen pages in the Oxford book.
Incidentally does anyone still read this book any more? It
remains of the highest interest, both for its preface (perhaps today
best remembered because it is where he compared Pound to "a
brilliant improvisator translating at sight from an unknown Greek
masterpiece") and for the half-prophetic, half-shortsighted taste
which governs the selection. The preface begins, fascinatingly,
with Yeats remembering as a boy of seventeen carrying "Walt Whitman
in his pocket" (!) and meeting in his father's studio "a querulous,
sensitive scholar", whose name was Gerard Hopkins. And in the body
of the anthology we indeed find prominence given to Hopkins and many
of the other poets who would still be chosen as major figures in any
such anthology: Bridges, Housman, Wilde, Tagore, Yeats himself,
Edith Sitwell, Eliot, Pound, Mac Neice, and Auden. But we also find
great prominence give to, in addition to Gogarty, Francis Thomson
(not just his ghastly Hound of Heaven, which might conceivably be
justified on the grounds of fame, but several other equally
appalling works), Lionel Johnson, Lawrence Binyon, Thomas Sturge
Moore, Lascelles Abercombie, Walter James Turner, Dorothy Wellesley,
Herbert Reade, and Sacheverell Sitwell. None of these poets have
worn very well, though Dorothy Wellesley and Herbert Reade I think are
still worth reading.
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