Podcasts about yeats

Song 1: “Day Never Comes,” composed and performed by David R. Merrill.Poem 1: “Leda and the Swan” by Nobel prize-winning poet W. B. Yeats, composed in 1923 and first printed in 1924.Fiction: “The Secret Pool,” by Lynn C. Miller, excerpted from her first novel The Fool's Journey, 2002 (Winedale Press). In press is the novel The Surrogate for 2026.  www.lynncmiller.comFeed the Cat Break: “The Legend of the Myth” by John V. ModaffPoem 2: “Another Story” by poet Hilda Raz, from a story that inspired Yeats and many others about the beautiful Leda and the god-turned-swan Zeus. In New and Collected Poems, Letter from a Place I've Never Been, from University of Nebraska Press, 2022.Song 2: “The Old Monsters Rest Home,” by John V. Modaff.Episode artwork by Lynda MillerShow theme and incidental music by John V. Modaff , BMIThe Unruly Muse is Recorded in Albuquerque, NM and Morehead, KY and produced at The Creek StudioNEXT UP:   Episode 48, “What is Beautiful?”   Thank You to our listeners all over the world. Please tell your friends about the podcast. Lynn & John

Le os coinn 100 bliana tá saothar nach beag déanta leis an Ghaeilge a chur chun cinn. Bunaíodh Gaelscoileanna, TG4, Raidió na Gaeltachta agus Roinn na Gaeltachta, gan trácht ar an iliomad rudaí eile ar an liosta mór fada. Ach go minic, déantar dearmad ar na mná a d'imir tionchar nach beag ar na gaiscí seo. Insíonn an leachtóir Katie Whelan dúinn faoi thionchar cheithre bhean cheannródaíocha a d'fhág a lorg féin ar shaol na Gaeilge. ­ Foclóir: Crann taca: Pillar or anchor ­ Soláthar: Provision ­ Seicteach: Sectarianist ­ Gaisce: Achievement ­ Lonnaíocht: Settlement ­ Acmhainní: Resources ­ Cumhacht aibhléise: Electricity ­ Iarmhairt: Consquence ­ Oiliúint: Training ­ An lorg a d'fhág siad: The mark they left ­ Ceardaíocht: Craftwork ­ Cuideachta: Company ­ Fostaíocht: EmploymentSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's Parisian revolution is a theatrical performance that produced a riot. David talks to theatre director Dominic Dromgoole about Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896), which only ran for a couple of nights but left an indelible mark on the culture of the age and has resonated ever since. Why did a play effectively written by children provoke such a storm among the adults? What made it it blow the mind of W. B. Yeats who was in the audience? How can something so bad be so liberating? Next time: Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Butler Yeats wrote this oft-quoted poem of the rise of evil in the world. I found it more challenging that many other Yeats poems to put to music and to sing, but tonight I've judged this full-rock-band version complete.  The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations over the years, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org  

Send us a text✨ FREE LEARNING RESOURCES FOR A YEAR! - https://irishpagan.school/freeIn this insightful episode, Jon O'Sullivan from the Irish Pagan School explores the fascinating myth of the Leannán Sidhe, the "Fairy Lover" of Irish mythology. Jon explores the stories of these mysterious beings who form romantic relationships with humans. From the tragic tales of Leannán Sidhe inspiring artistic greatness at the cost of life, to famous legends like Niamh and Oisín, this video uncovers the truth behind these fae lovers and the dangerous allure of such otherworldly relationships.Discover the different versions of these stories, from the darker predatory nature of the Leannán Sidhe to tales of deep connections between the Sidhe and humans. Jon also clarifies the sources of these myths, such as Lady Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and older folklore, providing a comprehensive look at these compelling figures of Irish lore.Learn more about the Aos Sidhe, Bean Sidhe, and how relationships between humans and the Sidhe have shaped Irish folklore and mythology.If you're interested in learning more about Irish mythology, spirituality, and folklore, explore free resources from the Irish Pagan School.✨ Irish Pagan Resources Checklist available NOW - https://irishpagan.school/checklist/

SLEERICKETS is a podcast about poetry and other intractable problems. My book Midlife now exists. Buy it here, or leave it a rating here or hereFor more SLEERICKETS, check out the SECRET SHOW and join the group chatLeave the show a rating here (actually, just do it on your phone, it's easier). Thanks!Wear SLEERICKETS t-shirts and hoodies. They look good!SLEERICKETS is now on YouTube!Some of the topics mentioned in this episode:Derek WalcottRuins of a Great House by Derek WalcottDisjecta membraEp 173: Swart Verse, ft. A. E. Stallings, Pt. 1The Islander by Hilton AlsWalcott Withdraws From Poetry Professor Election by Sarah LyallPoetic Justice: Briton Says She Helped Taint Rival by John F. BurnsDerek Walcott, a Mighty Poet, Has Died by Hilton AlsHilton Als: "I had this terrible need to confess, and I still do it. It's a bid to be loved" by Emma BrockesWe Might Have to "Shut Down the Country" by David RemnickThe Gifts of John Forbes by Kath KennyIn Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. AudenAlice Munro's Retreat by Anne EnrightAndré MalrauxCauseway (2022)Frequently mentioned names:– Joshua Mehigan– Shane McCrae– A. E. Stallings– Ryan Wilson– Morri Creech– Austin Allen– Jonathan Farmer– Zara Raab– Amit Majmudar– Ethan McGuire– Coleman Glenn– Chris Childers– Alexis Sears– JP Gritton– Alex Pepple– Ernie Hilbert– Joanna PearsonOther Ratbag Poetry Pods:Poetry Says by Alice AllanI Hate Matt Wall by Matt WallVersecraft by Elijah BlumovRatbag Poetics By David Jalal MotamedAlice: Poetry SaysBrian: @BPlatzerCameron: CameronWTC [at] hotmail [dot] comMatthew: sleerickets [at] gmail [dot] comMusic by ETRNLArt by Daniel Alexander Smith

What's the episode about?In this episode, hear Claire Nally on literature, Goth, Steampunk, death memoirs, representations of dead women, death positive libraries & working in academiaWho is Claire? Claire Nally is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University, UK, where sheresearches Irish Studies, Neo-Victorianism, Gender and Subcultures. She published her first monograph, Envisioning Ireland: W. B. Yeats's Occult Nationalism, in 2009, followed by her secondbook, Selling Ireland: Advertising, Literature and Irish Print Culture 1891–1922 (written with John Strachan). She has co-edited a volume on Yeats, and two volumes on gender, as well as the international library series ‘Gender and Popular Culture' for Bloomsbury (with Angela Smith).  She has written widely on a number of modern and contemporary topics, and her most recent monograph is Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian, published by Bloomsbury in 2019. She was co-I (with Stacey Pitsillides) on the Death Positive Library Project.  Her next book is entitled The Death Memoir in ContemporaryCulture.How do I cite the episode in my research and reading lists?To cite this episode, you can use the following citation: Nally, C. (2025) Interview on The Death Studies Podcast hosted by Michael-Fox, B. and Visser, R. Published 1 April 2025. Available at: www.thedeathstudiespodcast.com, DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.28704131What next?Check out more episodes or find out more about the hosts! Gota question? Get in touch.

John "Paddy" Hemingway died this St. Patrick's day. Dublin born, and in Dublin he died, but he was in the news because he was the last surviving RAF pilot from the Battle of Britain during WWII.  I immediately thought of this Yeats poem, about a fatalistic Irish pilot during WWI who flew into battle having no love for the British Empire. His Wikipedia summary mentions nothing about his weighing of the enormous risks he took in RAF battles, but a recounting of the number of times he was shot down and got back to flying again makes me think he'd accepted his death as a probable result of his service. Fate had sport with him, he lived to be 105. In his honor then, I performed Yeats poem with music I wrote this week. The Parlando Project has done over 800 of these combinations over the years, using various words (mostly literary poetry) with music in different styles. You can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives, located at frankhudson.org

Two countrymen explore Ireland's reverence for their national poet, W. B. Yeats. Then a Dublin journalist shares what it was like to grow up amid the turbulent societal changes in his city during the 1960s and '70s. And a guide from Belfast tells us why an Emerald Isle itinerary should include a visit to Northern Ireland. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.

"I have no rituals when it comes to writing. I don't want to think something can go wrong if things aren't set up the right way," says James McGovern of The Murder Capital. Indeed, that's the downside of a ritual: a fixed routine can limit your productivity when that routine isn't available. But McGovern does have one tiny "ritual" that I wholeheartedly endorse: writing the bad stuff before he gets to the good stuff.And as an aside, any songwriter who references Yeats, Keats, and Heaney in one podcast is forever my hero.The Murder Capital's latest album is BlindnessSend us a text

Send us a textA gleam of love in hard times. Our guest Ellen Cranitch shares poems from her Bloodaxe collection  Crystal, a subtle, multifaceted work arising from the discovery that her partner was addicted to crystal meth. Expect beauty, flashes of resilience and the deft capture of moments that sustain a relationship through this extreme challenge.  Robin and Peter have been rubbernecking at the recent Planetary Parade (we owe it to you dear listener because of our name) and use it as an excuse to open a celestial trove with dramatic lines from John Donne, from Odysseus Elytis transported from darkness on a highway of stars and from a heavenly (if passive-aggressive) W.B. Yeats. Then we sound a clarion note of Spring optimism from  Thomas Tranströmer. Support the showPlanet Poetry is a labour of love!If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support and Buy us a Coffee!

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) achieved something rare in American letters: a modernist poet who was popular with both critics and the public. Famous for her formal innovation, precise diction, and wit - as well as her black tri-corner hat and cloak, which she wore as she dashed around Manhattan - she was lauded by T.S. Eliot (and numerous prize committees) and treated by the public as a true American poet. Muhammad Ali asked her to write the liner notes to his album notes; Ford Motor Company asked her to name their line of cars. In this episode, Jacke talks to Moore scholar Cristanne Miller about Moore's life, Moore's work, and a new digital archive project that unites the two. Additional listening: 564 H.D. (with Lara Vetter) 56 Shelley, H.D., Yeats, Frost, Stevens (with Professor Bill Hogan) 176 William Carlos Williams's "The Use of Force" (with Mike Palindrome) The music in this episode is by Gabriel Ruiz-Bernal. Learn more at gabrielruizbernal.com. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Magic was real in the past, but is it the same today? Let's talk about modern paganism and ancient magic!--- Join and support the community: https://www.creationspaths.com/ In this episode of Creation's Paths, Charlie and Brian explore whether magic was real in the ancient world and how to live as a modern pagan. They discuss how much of contemporary paganism is a reconstruction rather than a direct continuation of the past and how every faith grapples with balancing old traditions and new practices. Examining biblical stories, historical magical duels like those between Aleister Crowley and W.B. Yeats, and the evolution of science from occult roots, they highlight how magic persists today—just in different forms. They emphasize re-enchanting the world by seeing magic and divine presence in everyday life rather than romanticizing or fossilizing the past. Whether through Brigid's forge (now metaphorically a computer or cell phone) or the enduring power of myths, they encourage listeners to embrace a living, evolving spirituality. Ultimately, they stress the importance of living in right relationship—with oneself, the environment, and the wisdom passed down—reminding us that paganism should be a thriving, relevant practice rather than a museum piece.Thank you for Liking and Subscribing to this podcastThank you for sharing this episode with your loved ones, friends and community--- Thank you for Tips or Donations: https://ko-fi.com/cedorsett https://patreon.com/cedorsett $CreationsPathsSubstack: https://www.creationspaths.com/ For all of the things we are doing at The Seraphic Grove go to Creation's Paths https://www.creationspaths.com/ For Educational Resource: https://wisdomscry.com Guided Meditations Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV0C8kiTKv0J2QAAlD1uaIJvQ3Sr9sIqO Christopagan Playlist:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV0C8kiTKv0ISXDQkZBRB7EHrUUJgXlGN The Everything Playlist:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV0C8kiTKv0Ln3eGW-tDk2R68PM6c182OCreation's Paths Podcast: http://www.creationspaths.com/podcast Church of the Oak Podcast: http://churchoftheoak.com/Hallowstead Podcast: http://hallowstead.com/Social Connections: BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/creationspaths.com Threads https://www.threads.net/@creationspaths Instagram https://www.instagram.com/creationspaths/## Chapters:00:00 Introduction to Modern Paganism01:07 Meet the Hosts: Charlie and Brian01:16 Exploring Ancient and Modern Magic04:40 The Role of Stories and History in Paganism09:14 Modern Pagan Practices and Reflections16:08 Living as a Modern Pagan25:37 Personal Experiences and Final Thoughts32:03 Closing Remarks and Prayer Get full access to Creation's Paths at www.creationspaths.com/subscribe

Daily QuoteDon't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. (Mark Twain)Poem of the DayThe White BirdsW.B. YeatsBeauty of Words择偶记朱自清

The panel discusses four poems by Yeats, including his most famous—"The Second Coming"—as a way of examining his understanding of a cyclical cosmology, whilst also looking at his depiction of cataclysmic events that influence or constrain free will.Continue reading

In this episode, James Marriott and I discuss who we think are the best twenty English poets. This is not the best poets who wrote in English, but the best British poets (though James snuck Sylvia Plath onto his list…). We did it like that to make it easier, not least so we could base a lot of our discussion on extracts in The Oxford Book of English Verse (Ricks edition). Most of what we read out is from there. We read Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Milton, and Pope. We both love Pope! (He should be regarded as one of the very best English poets, like Milton.) There are also readings of Herrick, Bronte, Cowper, and MacNiece. I plan to record the whole of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes' at some point soon.Here are our lists and below is the transcript (which may have more errors than usual, sorry!)HOGod Tier* Shakespeare“if not first, in the very first line”* Chaucer* Spenser* Milton* Wordsworth* Eliot—argue for Pope here, not usually includedSecond Tier* Donne* Herbert* Keats* Dryden* Gawain poet* Tom O'Bedlam poetThird Tier* Yeats* Tennyson* Hopkins* Coleridge* Auden* Shelley* MarvellJMShakespeareTier* ShakespeareTier 1* Chaucer* Milton* WordsworthTier 2* Donne* Eliot* Keats* Tennyson* Spencer* Marvell* PopeTier 3* Yeats* Hopkins* Blake* Coleridge* Auden* Shelley* Thomas Hardy* Larkin* PlathHenry: Today I'm talking to James Marriott, Times columnist, and more importantly, the writer of the Substack Cultural Capital. And we are going to argue about who are the best poets in the English language. James, welcome.James: Thanks very much for having me. I feel I should preface my appearance so that I don't bring your podcast and disrepute saying that I'm maybe here less as an expert of poetry and more as somebody who's willing to have strong and potentially species opinions. I'm more of a lover of poetry than I would claim to be any kind of academic expert, just in case anybody thinks that I'm trying to produce any definitive answer to the question that we're tackling.Henry: Yeah, no, I mean that's the same for me. We're not professors, we're just very opinionated boys. So we have lists.James: We do.Henry: And we're going to debate our lists, but what we do agree is that if we're having a top 20 English poets, Shakespeare is automatically in the God Tier and there's nothing to discuss.James: Yeah, he's in a category of his own. I think the way of, because I guess the plan we've gone for is to rather than to rank them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 into sort of, what is it, three or four broad categories that we're competing over.Henry: Yes, yes. TiersJames: I think is a more kind of reasonable way to approach it rather than trying to argue exactly why it should be one place above Shelly or I don't know, whatever.Henry: It's also just an excuse to talk about poets.James: Yes.Henry: Good. So then we have a sort of top tier, if not the first, in the very first line as it were, and you've got different people. To me, you've got Chaucer, Milton, and Wordsworth. I would also add Spenser and T.S. Eliot. So what's your problem with Spenser?James: Well, my problem is ignorance in that it's a while since I've read the Fairy Queen, which I did at university. Partly is just that looking back through it now and from what I remember of university, I mean it is not so much that I have anything against Spenser. It's quite how much I have in favour of Milton and Wordsworth and Chaucer, and I'm totally willing to be argued against on this, but I just can't think that Spenser is in quite the same league as lovely as many passages of the Fairy Queen are.Henry: So my case for Spenser is firstly, if you go through something like the Oxford Book of English Verse or some other comparable anthology, he's getting a similar page count to Shakespeare and Milton, he is important in that way. Second, it's not just the fairy queen, there's the Shepherd's Calendar, the sonnets, the wedding poems, and they're all highly accomplished. The Shepherd's Calendar particularly is really, really brilliant work. I think I enjoyed that more as an undergraduate, actually, much as I love the Fairy Queen. And the third thing is that the Fairy Queen is a very, very great epic. I mean, it's a tremendous accomplishment. There were lots of other epics knocking around in the 16th century that nobody wants to read now or I mean, obviously specialists want to read, but if we could persuade a few more people, a few more ordinary readers to pick up the fairy queen, they would love it.James: Yes, and I was rereading before he came on air, the Bower of Bliss episode, which I think is from the second book, which is just a beautifully lush passage, passage of writing. It was really, I mean, you can see why Keats was so much influenced by it. The point about Spenser's breadth is an interesting one because Milton is in my top category below Shakespeare, but I think I'm placing him there pretty much only on the basis of Paradise Lost. I think if we didn't have Paradise Lost, Milton may not even be in this competition at all for me, very little. I know. I don't know if this is a heresy, I've got much less time for Milton's minor works. There's Samuel Johnson pretty much summed up my feelings on Lycidas when he said there was nothing new. Whatever images it can supply are long ago, exhausted, and I do feel there's a certain sort of dryness to Milton's minor stuff. I mean, I can find things like Il Penseroso and L'Allegro pretty enough, but I mean, I think really the central achievement is Paradise Lost, whereas Spenser might be in contention, as you say, from if you didn't have the Fairy Queen, you've got Shepherd's Calendar, and all this other sort of other stuff, but Paradise Lost is just so massive for me.Henry: But if someone just tomorrow came out and said, oh, we found a whole book of minor poetry by Virgil and it's all pretty average, you wouldn't say, oh, well Virgil's less of a great poet.James: No, absolutely, and that's why I've stuck Milton right at the top. It's just sort of interesting how unbelievably good Paradise Lost is and how, in my opinion, how much less inspiring the stuff that comes after it is Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained I really much pleasure out of at all and how, I mean the early I think slightly dry Milton is unbelievably accomplished, but Samuel Johnson seems to say in that quote is a very accomplished use of ancient slightly worn out tropes, and he's of putting together these old ideas in a brilliant manner and he has this sort of, I mean I guess he's one of your late bloomers. I can't quite remember how old he is when he publishes Paradise Lost.Henry: Oh, he is. Oh, writing it in his fifties. Yeah.James: Yeah, this just extraordinary thing that's totally unlike anything else in English literature and of all the poems that we're going to talk about, I think is the one that has probably given me most pleasure in my life and the one that I probably return to most often if not to read all the way through then to just go over my favourite bits and pieces of it.Henry: A lot of people will think Milton is heavy and full of weird references to the ancient world and learned and biblical and not very readable for want of a better word. Can you talk us out of that? To be one of the great poets, they do have to have some readability, right?James: Yeah, I think so, and it's certainly how I felt. I mean I think it's not a trivial objection to have to Milton. It's certainly how I found him. He was my special author paper at university and I totally didn't get on with him. There was something about his massive brilliance that I felt. I remember feeling like trying to write about Paradise Lost was trying to kind of scratch a huge block of marble with your nails. There's no way to get a handle on it. I just couldn't work out what to get ahold of, and it's only I think later in adulthood maybe reading him under a little less pressure that I've come to really love him. I mean, the thing I would always say to people to look out for in Milton, but it's his most immediate pleasure and the thing that still is what sends shivers done my spine about him is the kind of cosmic scale of Paradise Lost, and it's almost got this sort of sci-fi massiveness to it. One of my very favourite passages, which I may inflict on you, we did agree that we could inflict poetry on one another.Henry: Please, pleaseJames: It's a detail from the first book of Paradise Lost. Milton's talking about Satan's architect in hell Mulciber, and this is a little explanation of who or part of his explanation of who Mulciber is, and he says, Nor was his name unheard or unadoredIn ancient Greece; and in Ausonian landMen called him Mulciber; and how he fellFrom Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry JoveSheer o'er the crystal battlements: from mornTo noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,A summer's day, and with the setting sunDropt from the zenith, like a falling star,On Lemnos, th' Aegaean isle. Thus they relate,ErringI just think it's the sort of total massiveness of that universe that “from the zenith to like a falling star”. I just can't think of any other poet in English or that I've ever read in any language, frankly, even in translation, who has that sort of scale about it, and I think that's what can most give immediate pleasure. The other thing I love about that passage is this is part of the kind of grandeur of Milton is that you get this extraordinary passage about an angel falling from heaven down to th' Aegean Isle who's then going to go to hell and the little parenthetic remark at the end, the perm just rolls on, thus they relate erring and paradise lost is such this massive grand thing that it can contain this enormous cosmic tragedy as a kind of little parenthetical thing. I also think the crystal battlements are lovely, so wonderful kind of sci-fi detail.Henry: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it's under appreciated that Milton was a hugely important influence on Charles Darwin who was a bit like you always rereading it when he was young, especially on the beagle voyage. He took it with him and quotes it in his letters sometimes, and it is not insignificant the way that paradise loss affects him in terms of when he writes his own epic thinking at this level, thinking at this scale, thinking at the level of the whole universe, how does the whole thing fit together? What's the order behind the little movements of everything? So Milton's reach I think is actually quite far into the culture even beyond the poets.James: That's fascinating. Do you have a particular favourite bit of Paradise Lost?Henry: I do, but I don't have it with me because I disorganised and couldn't find my copy.James: That's fair.Henry: What I want to do is to read one of the sonnets because I do think he's a very, very good sonnet writer, even if I'm going to let the Lycidas thing go, because I'm not going to publicly argue against Samuel Johnson.When I consider how my light is spent,Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,And that one Talent which is death to hideLodged with me useless, though my Soul more bentTo serve therewith my Maker, and presentMy true account, lest he returning chide;“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”I fondly ask. But patience, to preventThat murmur, soon replies, “God doth not needEither man's work or his own gifts; who bestBear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His stateIs Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speedAnd post o'er Land and Ocean without rest:They also serve who only stand and wait.”I think that's great.James: Yeah. Okay. It is good.Henry: Yeah. I think the minor poems are very uneven, but there are lots of gems.James: Yeah, I mean he is a genius. It would be very weird if all the minor poems were s**t, which is not really what I'm trying… I guess I have a sort of slightly austere category too. I just do Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, but we are agreed on Wordsworth, aren't we? That he belongs here.Henry: So my feeling is that the story of English poetry is something like Chaucer Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot create a kind of spine. These are the great innovators. They're writing the major works, they're the most influential. All the cliches are true. Chaucer invented iambic pentameter. Shakespeare didn't single handedly invent modern English, but he did more than all the rest of them put together. Milton is the English Homer. Wordsworth is the English Homer, but of the speech of the ordinary man. All these old things, these are all true and these are all colossal achievements and I don't really feel that we should be picking between them. I think Spenser wrote an epic that stands alongside the works of Shakespeare and Milton in words with T.S. Eliot whose poetry, frankly I do not love in the way that I love some of the other great English writers cannot be denied his position as one of the great inventors.James: Yeah, I completely agree. It's funny, I think, I mean I really do love T.S. Eliot. Someone else had spent a lot of time rereading. I'm not quite sure why he hasn't gone into quite my top category, but I think I had this—Henry: Is it because he didn't like Milton and you're not having it?James: Maybe that's part of it. I think my thought something went more along the lines of if I cut, I don't quite feel like I'm going to put John Donne in the same league as Milton, but then it seems weird to put Eliot above Donne and then I don't know that, I mean there's not a very particularly fleshed out thought, but on Wordsworth, why is Wordsworth there for you? What do you think, what do you think are the perms that make the argument for Wordsworth having his place at the very top?Henry: Well, I think the Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes and the Prelude are all of it, aren't they? I'm not a lover of the rest, and I think the preface to the Lyrical Ballads is one of the great works of literary criticism, which is another coin in his jar if you like, but in a funny way, he's much more revolutionary than T.S. Eliot. We think of modernism as the great revolution and the great sort of bringing of all the newness, but modernism relies on Wordsworth so much, relies on the idea that tradition can be subsumed into ordinary voice, ordinary speech, the passage in the Wasteland where he has all of them talking in the bar. Closing time please, closing time please. You can't have that without Wordsworth and—James: I think I completely agree with what you're saying.Henry: Yeah, so I think that's for me is the basis of it that he might be the great innovator of English poetry.James: Yeah, I think you're right because I've got, I mean again, waiting someone out of my depth here, but I can't think of anybody else who had sort of specifically and perhaps even ideologically set out to write a kind of high poetry that sounded like ordinary speech, I guess. I mean, Wordsworth again is somebody who I didn't particularly like at university and I think it's precisely about plainness that can make him initially off-putting. There's a Matthew Arnold quote where he says of Wordsworth something like He has no style. Henry: Such a Matthew Arnold thing to say.James: I mean think it's the beginning of an appreciation, but there's a real blankness to words with I think again can almost mislead you into thinking there's nothing there when you first encounter him. But yeah, I think for me, Tintern Abbey is maybe the best poem in the English language.Henry: Tintern Abbey is great. The Intimations of Immortality Ode is superb. Again, I don't have it with me, but the Poems in Two Volumes. There are so many wonderful things in there. I had a real, when I was an undergraduate, I had read some Wordsworth, but I hadn't really read a lot and I thought of I as you do as the daffodils poet, and so I read Lyrical Ballads and Poems in Two Volumes, and I had one of these electrical conversion moments like, oh, the daffodils, that is nothing. The worst possible thing for Wordsworth is that he's remembered as this daffodils poet. When you read the Intimations of Immortality, do you just think of all the things he could have been remembered for? It's diminishing.James: It's so easy to get into him wrong because the other slightly wrong way in is through, I mean maybe this is a prejudice that isn't widely shared, but the stuff that I've never particularly managed to really enjoy is all the slightly worthy stuff about beggars and deformed people and maimed soldiers. Wandering around on roads in the lake district has always been less appealing to me, and that was maybe why I didn't totally get on with 'em at first, and I mean, there's some bad words with poetry. I was looking up the infamous lines from the form that were mocked even at the time where you know the lines that go, You see a little muddy pond Of water never dry. I've measured it from side to side, 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide, and the sort of plainness condescend into banality at Wordsworth's worst moments, which come more frequently later in his career.Henry: Yes, yes. I'm going to read a little bit of the Intimations ode because I want to share some of this so-called plainness at its best. This is the third section. They're all very short Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,And while the young lambs boundAs to the tabor's sound,To me alone there came a thought of grief:A timely utterance gave that thought relief,And I again am strong:The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,And all the earth is gay;Land and seaGive themselves up to jollity,And with the heart of MayDoth every Beast keep holiday;—Thou Child of Joy,Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.And I think it's unthinkable that someone would write like this today. It would be cringe, but we're going to have a new sincerity. It's coming. It's in some ways it's already here and I think Wordsworth will maybe get a different sort of attention when that happens because that's a really high level of writing to be able to do that without it descending into what you just read. In the late Wordsworth there's a lot of that really bad stuff.James: Yeah, I mean the fact that he wrote some of that bad stuff I guess is a sign of quite how carefully the early stuff is treading that knife edge of tripping into banality. Can I read you my favourite bit of Tintern Abbey?Henry: Oh yes. That is one of the great poems.James: Yeah, I just think one of mean I, the most profound poem ever, probably for me. So this is him looking out over the landscape of Tinton Abbey. I mean these are unbelievably famous lines, so I'm sure everybody listening will know them, but they are so good And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woodsAnd mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; of all the mighty worldOf eye, and ear,—both what they half create,And what perceive; well pleased to recogniseIn nature and the language of the senseThe anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulOf all my moral being.I mean in a poem, it's just that is mind blowingly good to me?Henry: Yeah. I'm going to look up another section from the Prelude, which used to be in the Oxford Book, but it isn't in the Ricks edition and I don't really know whyJames: He doesn't have much of the Prelude does he?Henry: I don't think he has any…James: Yeah.Henry: So this is from an early section when the young Wordsworth is a young boy and he's going off, I think he's sneaking out at night to row on the lake as you do when you with Wordsworth, and the initial description is of a mountain. She was an elfin pinnace; lustilyI dipped my oars into the silent lake,And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boatWent heaving through the water like a swan;When, from behind that craggy steep till thenThe horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,And growing still in stature the grim shapeTowered up between me and the stars, and still,For so it seemed, with purpose of its ownAnd measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,And through the silent water stole my wayBack to the covert of the willow tree;It's so much like that in Wordsworth. It's just,James: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the Prelude is full of things like that. I think that is probably one of the best moments, possibly the best moments of the prelude. But yeah, I mean it's just total genius isn't it?Henry: I think he's very, very important and yeah, much more important than T.S. Eliot who is, I put him in the same category, but I can see why you didn't.James: You do have a little note saying Pope, question mark or something I think, don't you, in the document.Henry: So the six I gave as the spine of English literature and everything, that's an uncontroversial view. I think Pope should be one of those people. I think we should see Pope as being on a level with Milton and Wordsworth, and I think he's got a very mixed reputation, but I think he was just as inventive, just as important. I think you are a Pope fan, just as clever, just as moving, and it baffles me that he's not more commonly regarded as part of this great spine running through the history of English literature and between Milton and Wordsworth. If you don't have Pope, I think it's a missing link if you like.James: I mean, I wouldn't maybe go as far as you, I love Pope. Pope was really the first perch I ever loved. I remember finding a little volume of Pope in a box of books. My school library was chucking out, and that was the first book of poetry I read and took seriously. I guess he sort of suffers by the fact that we are seeing all of this through the lens of the romantics. All our taste about Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser has been formed by the romantics and hope's way of writing the Satires. This sort of society poetry I think is just totally doesn't conform to our idea of what poetry should be doing or what poetry is. Is there absolutely or virtually nobody reads Dryden nowadays. It's just not what we think poetry is for that whole Augustine 18th century idea that poetry is for writing epistles to people to explain philosophical concepts to them or to diss your enemies and rivals or to write a kind of Duncia explaining why everyone you know is a moron. That's just really, I guess Byron is the last major, is the only of figure who is in that tradition who would be a popular figure nowadays with things like English bards and scotch reviewers. But that whole idea of poetry I think was really alien to us. And I mean I'm probably formed by that prejudice because I really do love Pope, but I don't love him as much as the other people we've discussed.Henry: I think part of his problem is that he's clever and rational and we want our poems always to be about moods, which may be, I think why George Herbert, who we've both got reasonably high is also quite underrated. He's very clever. He's always think George Herbert's always thinking, and when someone like Shakespeare or Milton is thinking, they do it in such a way that you might not notice and that you might just carry on with the story. And if you do see that they're thinking you can enjoy that as well. Whereas Pope is just explicitly always thinking and maybe lecturing, hectoring, being very grand with you and as you say, calling you an idiot. But there are so many excellent bits of Pope and I just think technically he can sustain a thought or an argument over half a dozen or a dozen lines and keep the rhyme scheme moving and it's never forced, and he never has to do that thing where he puts the words in a stupid order just to make the rhyme work. He's got such an elegance and a balance of composition, which again, as you say, we live under romantic ideals, not classical ones. But that doesn't mean we should be blind to the level of his accomplishment, which is really, really very high. I mean, Samuel Johnson basically thought that Alexander Pope had finished English poetry. We have the end of history. He had the end of English poetry. Pope, he's brought us to the mightiest of the heroic couplers and he's done it. It's all over.James: The other thing about Pope that I think makes us underrate him is that he's very charming. And I think charm is a quality we're not big on is that sort of, but I think some of Pope's charm is so moving. One of my favourite poems of his is, do you know the Epistle to Miss Blount on going into the country? The poem to the young girl who's been having a fashionable season in London then is sent to the boring countryside to stay with an aunt. And it's this, it's not like a romantic love poem, it's not distraught or hectic. It's just a sort of wonderful act of sympathy with this potentially slightly airheaded young girl who's been sent to the countryside, which you'd rather go to operas and plays and flirt with people. And there's a real sort of delicate in it that isn't overblown and isn't dramatic, but is extremely charming. And I think that's again, another quality that perhaps we're prone not to totally appreciate in the 21st century. It's almost the kind of highest form of politeness and sympathyHenry: And the prevailing quality in Pope is wit: “True wit is nature to advantage dressed/ What often was thought, but ne'er so well expressed”. And I think wit can be quite alienating for an audience because it is a kind of superior form of literary art. This is why people don't read as much Swift as he deserves because he's so witty and so scornful that a lot of people will read him and think, well, I don't like you.James: And that point about what oft was thought and ne'er so well expressed again, is a very classical idea. The poet who puts not quite conventional wisdom, but something that's been thought before in the best possible words, really suffers with the romantic idea of originality. The poet has to say something utterly new. Whereas for Pope, the sort of ideas that he express, some of the philosophical ideas are not as profound in original perhaps as words with, but he's very elegant proponent of them.Henry: And we love b******g people in our culture, and I feel like the Dunciad should be more popular because it is just, I can't remember who said this, but someone said it's probably the most under appreciated great poem in English, and that's got to be true. It's full of absolute zingers. There's one moment where he's described the whole crowd of them or all these poets who he considers to be deeply inferior, and it turns out he was right because no one reads them anymore. And you need footnotes to know who they are. I mean, no one cares. And he says, “equal your merits, equal is your din”. This kind of abuse is a really high art, and we ought to love that. We love that on Twitter. And I think things like the Rape of the Lock also could be more popular.James: I love the Rape of the Lock . I mean, I think anybody is not reading Pope and is looking for a way in, I think the Rape of the Lock is the way in, isn't it? Because it's just such a charming, lovely, funny poem.Henry: It is. And probably it suffers because the whole idea of mock heroic now is lost to us. But it's a bit like it's the literary equivalent of people writing a sort of mini epic about someone like Elon Musk or some other very prominent figure in the culture and using lots of heroic imagery from the great epics of Homer and Virgil and from the Bible and all these things, but putting them into a very diminished state. So instead of being grand, it becomes comic. It's like turning a God into a cartoon. And Pope is easily the best writer that we have for that kind of thing. Dryden, but he's the genius on it.James: Yeah, no, he totally is. I guess it's another reason he's under appreciated is that our culture is just much less worshipful of epic than the 18th century culture was. The 18th century was obsessed with trying to write epics and trying to imitate epics. I mean, I think to a lot of Pope's contemporaries, the achievement they might've been expecting people to talk about in 300 years time would be his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the other stuff might've seen more minor in comparison, whereas it's the mock epic that we're remembering him for, which again is perhaps another symptom of our sort of post romantic perspective.Henry: I think this is why Spenser suffers as well, because everything in Spenser is magical. The knights are fairies, not the little fairies that live in buttercups, but big human sized fairies or even bigger than that. And there are magical women and saucers and the whole thing is a sort of hodgepodge of romance and fairy tale and legend and all this stuff. And it's often said, oh, he was old fashioned in his own time. But those things still had a lot of currency in the 16th century. And a lot of those things are in Shakespeare, for example.But to us, that's like a fantasy novel. Now, I love fantasy and I read fantasy, and I think some of it's a very high accomplishment, but to a lot of people, fantasy just means kind of trash. Why am I going to read something with fairies and a wizard? And I think a lot of people just see Spenser and they're like, what is this? This is so weird. They don't realise how Protestant they're being, but they're like, this is so weird.James: And Pope has a little, I mean, the Rape of the Lock even has a little of the same because the rape of the lock has this attendant army of good spirits called selfs and evil spirits called gnomes. I mean, I find that just totally funny and charming. I really love it.Henry: I'm going to read, there's an extract from the Rape of the Lock in the Oxford Book, and I'm going to read a few lines to give people an idea of how he can be at once mocking something but also quite charming about it. It's quite a difficult line to draw. The Rape of the Lock is all about a scandalous incident where a young man took a lock of a lady's hair. Rape doesn't mean what we think it means. It means an offence. And so because he stole a lock of her hair, it'd become obviously this huge problem and everyone's in a flurry. And to sort of calm everyone down, Pope took it so seriously that he made it into a tremendous joke. So here he is describing the sort of dressing table if you like.And now, unveil'd, the Toilet stands display'd,Each silver Vase in mystic order laid.First, rob'd in white, the Nymph intent adores,With head uncover'd, the Cosmetic pow'rs.A heav'nly image in the glass appears,To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;Th' inferior Priestess, at her altar's side,Trembling begins the sacred rites of Pride.What a way to describe someone putting on their makeup. It's fantastic.James: It's funny. I can continue that because the little passage of Pope I picked to read begins exactly where yours ended. It only gets better as it goes on, I think. So after trembling begins the sacred rites of pride, Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and hereThe various off'rings of the world appear;From each she nicely culls with curious toil,And decks the Goddess with the glitt'ring spoil.This casket India's glowing gems unlocks,And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,Transformed to combs, the speckled, and the white.Here files of pins extend their shining rows,Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.It's just so lovely. I love a thing about the tortoise and the elephant unite because you've got a tortoise shell and an ivory comb. And the stuff about India's glowing gems and Arabia breathing from yonder box, I mean that's a, realistic is not quite the word, but that's a reference to Milton because Milton is continually having all the stones of Arabia and India's pearls and things all screwed through paradise lost. Yeah, it's just so lovely, isn't it?Henry: And for someone who's so classical and composed and elegant, there's something very Dickensian about things like the toilet, the tortoise and the elephant here unite, transform to combs. There's something a little bit surreal and the puffs, powders, patches, bibles, it has that sort of slightly hectic, frantic,James: That's sort of Victorian materialism, wealth of material objects,Henry: But also that famous thing that was said of Dickens, that the people are furniture and the furniture's like people. He can bring to life all the little bits and bobs of the ordinary day and turn it into something not quite ridiculous, not quite charming.James: And there is a kind of charm in the fact that it wasn't the sort of thing that poets would necessarily expect to pay attention to the 18th century. I don't think the sort of powders and ointments on a woman's dressing table. And there's something very sort of charming in his condescension to notice or what might've once seemed his condescension to notice those things, to find a new thing to take seriously, which is what poetry or not quite to take seriously, but to pay attention to, which I guess is one of the things that great perch should always be doing.Henry: When Swift, who was Pope's great friend, wrote about this, he wrote a poem called A Beautiful Young Lady Going to Bed, which is not as good, and I would love to claim Swift on our list, but I really can't.James: It's quite a horrible perm as well, that one, isn't it?Henry: It is. But it shows you how other people would treat the idea of the woman in front of her toilet, her mirror. And Swift uses an opportunity, as he said, to “lash the vice” because he hated all this adornment and what he would think of as the fakery of a woman painting herself. And so he talks about Corina pride of Drury Lane, which is obviously an ironic reference to her being a Lady of the Night, coming back and there's no drunken rake with her. Returning at the midnight hour;Four stories climbing to her bow'r;Then, seated on a three-legged chair,Takes off her artificial hair:Now, picking out a crystal eye,She wipes it clean, and lays it by.Her eye-brows from a mouse's hide,Stuck on with art on either side,Pulls off with care, and first displays 'em,Then in a play-book smoothly lays 'em.Now dexterously her plumpers draws,That serve to fill her hollow jaws.And it goes on like this. I mean, line after this is sort of raw doll quality to it, Pope, I think in contrast, it only illuminates him more to see where others are taking this kind of crude, very, very funny and witty, but very crude approach. He's able to really have the classical art of balance.James: Yes. And it's precisely his charm that he can mock it and sympathise and love it at the same time, which I think is just a more sort of complex suite of poetic emotions to have about that thing.Henry: So we want more people to read Pope and to love Pope.James: Yes. Even if I'm not letting him into my top.Henry: You are locking him out of the garden. Now, for the second tier, I want to argue for two anonymous poets. One of the things we did when we were talking about this was we asked chatGPT to see if it could give us a good answer. And if you use o1 or o1 Pro, it gives you a pretty good answer as to who the best poets in English are. But it has to be told that it's forgotten about the anonymous poets. And then it says, oh, that was stupid. There are quite a lot of good anonymous poets in English, but I suspect a lot of us, a lot of non artificial intelligence when thinking about this question overlook the anonymous poets. But I would think the Gawain poet and the Tom O' Bedlam poet deserve to be in here. I don't know what you think about that.James: I'm not competent to provide an opinion. I'm purely here to be educated on the subject of these anonymous poets. Henry: The Gawain poet, he's a mediaeval, assume it's a he, a mediaeval writer, obviously may well not be a man, a mediaeval writer. And he wrote Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, which is, if you haven't read it, you should really read it in translation first, I think because it's written at the same time as Chaucer. But Chaucer was written in a kind of London dialect, which is what became the English we speak. And so you can read quite a lot of Chaucer and the words look pretty similar and sometimes you need the footnotes, but when you read Gawain and The Green Knight, it's in a Northwestern dialect, which very much did not become modern day English. And so it's a bit more baffling, but it is a poem of tremendous imaginative power and weirdness. It's a very compelling story. We have a children's version here written by Selena Hastings who's a very accomplished biographer. And every now and then my son remembers it and he just reads it again and again and again. It's one of the best tales of King Arthur in his knights. And there's a wonderful book by John Burrow. It's a very short book, but that is such a loving piece of criticism that explicates the way in which that poem promotes virtue and all the nightly goodness that you would expect, but also is a very strange and unreal piece of work. And I think it has all the qualities of great poetry, but because it's written in this weird dialect, I remember as an undergraduate thinking, why is this so bloody difficult to read? But it is just marvellous. And I see people on Twitter, the few people who've read it, they read it again and they just say, God, it's so good. And I think there was a film of it a couple of years ago, but we will gloss lightly over that and not encourage you to do the film instead of the book.James: Yeah, you're now triggering a memory that I was at least set to read and perhaps did at least read part of Gawain and the Green Knight at University, but has not stuck to any brain cells at all.Henry: Well, you must try it again and tell me what you think. I mean, I find it easily to be one of the best poems in English.James: Yeah, no, I should. I had a little Chaucer kick recently actually, so maybe I'm prepared to rediscover mediaeval per after years of neglect since my degree,Henry: And it's quite short, which I always think is worth knowing. And then the Tom Bedlam is an anonymous poem from I think the 17th century, and it's one of the mad songs, so it's a bit like the Fool from King Lear. And again, it is a very mysterious, very strange and weird piece of work. Try and find it in and read the first few lines. And I think because it's anonymous, it's got slightly less of a reputation because it can't get picked up with some big name, but it is full of tremendous power. And again, I think it would be sad if it wasn't more well known.From the hag and hungry goblinThat into rags would rend ye,The spirit that stands by the naked manIn the Book of Moons defend ye,That of your five sound sensesYou never be forsaken,Nor wander from your selves with TomAbroad to beg your bacon,While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,Feeding, drink, or clothing;Come dame or maid, be not afraid,Poor Tom will injure nothing.Anyway, so you get the sense of it and it's got many stanzas and it's full of this kind of energy and it's again, very accomplished. It can carry the thought across these long lines and these long stanzas.James: When was it written? I'm aware of only if there's a name in the back of my mind.Henry: Oh, it's from the 17th century. So it's not from such a different time as King Lear, but it's written in the voice of a madman. And again, you think of that as the sort of thing a romantic poet would do. And it's strange to find it almost strange to find it displaced. There were these other mad songs. But I think because it's anonymous, it gets less well known, it gets less attention. It's not part of a bigger body of work, but it's absolutely, I think it's wonderful.James: I shall read it.Henry: So who have you got? Who else? Who are you putting in instead of these two?James: Hang on. So we're down to tier two now.Henry: Tier two.James: Yeah. So my tier two is: Donne, Elliot, Keats, Tennyson. I've put Spenser in tier two, Marvell and Pope, who we've already discussed. I mean, I think Eliot, we've talked about, I mean Donne just speaks for himself and there's probably a case that some people would make to bump him up a tier. Henry: Anybody can read that case in Katherine Rudell's book. We don't need to…James: Yes, exactly. If anybody's punching perhaps in tier two, it's Tennyson who I wasn't totally sure belonged there. Putting Tenon in the same tier as Donne and Spenser and Keets. I wonder if that's a little ambitious. I think that might raise eyebrows because there is a school of thought, which I'm not totally unsympathetic to this. What's the Auden quote about Tennyson? I really like it. I expressed very harshly, but I sort of get what he means. Auden said that Tennyson “had the finest ear perhaps of any English poet who was also undoubtedly the stupidest. There was little that he didn't know. There was little else that he did.” Which is far too harsh. But I mentioned to you earlier that I think was earlier this year, a friend and I had a project where we were going to memorise a perva week was a plan. We ended up basically getting, I think three quarters of the way through.And if there's a criticism of Tennyson that you could make, it's that the word music and the sheer lushness of phrases sometimes becomes its own momentum. And you can end up with these extremely lovely but sometimes slightly empty beautiful phrases, which is what I ended up feeling about Tithonus. And I sort of slightly felt I was memorising this unbelievably beautiful but ever so slightly hollow thing. And that was slightly why the project fell apart, I should say. Of course, they absolutely love Tennyson. He's one of my all time favourite poets, which is why my personal favouritism has bumped him up into that category. But I can see there's a case, and I think to a lot of people, he's just the kind of Victorian establishment gloom man, which is totally unfair, but there's not no case against Tennyson.Henry: Yeah, the common thing is that he has no ideas. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm also, I'm not sure how desperately important it is. It should be possible to be a great poet without ideas being at the centre of your work. If you accept the idea that the essence of poetry is invention, i.e. to say old things in a fantastically new way, then I think he qualifies very well as a great poet.James: Yes..Henry: Well, very well. I think Auden said what he said because he was anxious that it was true of himself.James: Yeah, I mean there's a strong argument that Auden had far too many ideas and the sorts of mad schemes and fantastical theories about history that Auden spent his spare time chasing after is certainly a kind of argument that poets maybe shouldn't have as many ideas, although it's just reading. Seamus Perry's got a very good little book on Tennyson, and the opening chapter is all about arguments about people who have tended to dislike Tennyson. And there are all kinds of embarrassing anecdotes about the elderly Tennyson trying to sort of go around dinner parties saying profound and sage-like things and totally putting his foot in it and saying things are completely banal. I should have made a note that this was sort of slightly, again, intensifying my alarm about is there occasionally a tinsely hollowness about Tennyson. I'm now being way too harsh about one of my favourite poets—Henry: I think it depends what you mean by ideas. He is more than just a poet of moods. He gives great expression, deep and strongly felt expression to a whole way of being and a whole way of conceiving of things. And it really was a huge part of why people became interested in the middle ages in the 19th century. I think there's Walter Scott and there's Tennyson who are really leading that work, and that became a dominant cultural force and it became something that meant a lot to people. And whether or not, I don't know whether it's the sort of idea that we're talking about, but I think that sort of thing, I think that qualifies as having ideas and think again, I think he's one of the best writers about the Arthurian legend. Now that work doesn't get into the Oxford Book of English Verse, maybe that's fair. But I think it was very important and I love it. I love it. And I find Tennyson easy to memorise, which is another point in his favour.James: Yeah.Henry: I'm going to read a little bit of Ulysses, which everyone knows the last five or six lines of that poem because it gets put into James Bond films and other such things. I'm going to read it from a little bit from earlier on. I am become a name;For always roaming with a hungry heartMuch have I seen and known; cities of menAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;And drunk delight of battle with my peers,Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.I am a part of all that I have met;Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.I think that's amazing. And he can do that. He can do lots and lots and lots of that.James: Yeah, he really can. It's stunning. “Far on the ringing planes of windy Troy” is such an unbelievably evocative phrase.Henry: And that's what I mean. He's got this ability to bring back a sort of a whole mood of history. It's not just personal mood poetry. He can take you into these places and that is in the space of a line. In the space of a line. I think Matthew Arnold said of the last bit of what I just read is that he had this ability in Ulysses to make the lines seem very long and slow and to give them this kind of epic quality that far goes far beyond the actual length of that poem. Ulysses feels like this huge poem that's capturing so much of Homer and it's a few dozen lines.James: Yeah, no, I completely agree. Can I read a little bit of slightly more domestic Tennyson, from In Memoriam, I think his best poem and one of my all time favourite poems and it's got, there are many sort of famous lines on grief and things, but there's little sort of passage of natural description I think quite near the beginning that I've always really loved and I've always just thought was a stunning piece of poetry in terms of its sound and the way that the sound has patented and an unbelievably attentive description natural world, which is kind of the reason that even though I think Keats is a better poet, I do prefer reading Tennyson to Keats, so this is from the beginning of In Memoriam. Calm is the morn without a sound,Calm as to suit a calmer grief,And only thro' the faded leafThe chesnut pattering to the ground:Calm and deep peace on this high wold,And on these dews that drench the furze,And all the silvery gossamersThat twinkle into green and gold:Calm and still light on yon great plainThat sweeps with all its autumn bowers,And crowded farms and lessening towers,To mingle with the bounding main:And I just think that's an amazing piece of writing that takes you from that very close up image that it begins with of the “chestnut patterning to the ground” through the faded leaves of the tree, which is again, a really attentive little bit of natural description. I think anyone can picture the way that a chestnut might fall through the leaves of a chestnut tree, and it's just an amazing thing to notice. And I think the chestnut pattern to the ground does all the kind of wonderful, slightly onomatopoeic, Tennyson stuff so well, but by the end, you're kind of looking out over the English countryside, you've seen dew on the firs, and then you're just looking out across the plane to the sea, and it's this sort of, I just think it's one of those bits of poetry that anybody who stood in a slightly wet and romantic day in the English countryside knows exactly the feeling that he's evoking. And I mean there's no bit of—all of In Memoriam is pretty much that good. That's not a particularly celebrated passage I don't think. It's just wonderful everywhere.Henry: Yes. In Memoriam a bit like the Dunciad—under appreciated relative to its huge merits.James: Yeah, I think it sounds, I mean guess by the end of his life, Tennyson had that reputation as the establishment sage of Victorian England, queen of Victoria's favourite poet, which is a pretty off-putting reputation for to have. And I think In Memoriam is supposed to be this slightly cobwebby, musty masterpiece of Victorian grief. But there was just so much, I mean, gorgeous, beautiful sensuous poetry in it.Henry: Yeah, lots of very intense feelings. No, I agree. I have Tennyson my third tier because I had to have the Gawain poet, but I agree that he's very, very great.James: Yeah, I think the case for third tier is I'm very open to that case for the reasons that I said.Henry: Keats, we both have Keats much higher than Shelly. I think Byron's not on anyone's list because who cares about Byron. Overrated, badly behaved. Terrible jokes. Terrible jokes.James: I think people often think Byron's a better pert without having read an awful lot of the poetry of Byron. But I think anybody who's tried to wade through long swathes of Don Juan or—Henry: My God,James: Childe Harold, has amazing, amazing, beautiful moments. But yeah, there's an awful lot of stuff that you don't enjoy. I think.Henry: So to make the case for Keats, I want to talk about The Eve of St. Agnes, which I don't know about you, but I love The Eve of St. Agnes. I go back to it all the time. I find it absolutely electric.James: I'm going to say that Keats is a poet, which is kind of weird for somebody is sent to us and obviously beautiful as Keats. I sort of feel like I admire more than I love. I get why he's brilliant. It's very hard not to see why he's brilliant, but he's someone I would very rarely sit down and read for fun and somebody got an awful lot of feeling or excitement out of, but that's clearly a me problem, not a Keats problem.Henry: When I was a teenager, I knew so much Keats by heart. I knew the whole of the Ode to a Nightingale. I mean, I was absolutely steeped in it morning, noon and night. I couldn't get over it. And now I don't know if I could get back to that point. He was a very young poet and he writes in a very young way. But I'm going to read—The Eve of St. Agnes is great. It's a narrative poem, which I think is a good way to get into this stuff because the story is fantastic. And he had read Spenser, he was part of this kind of the beginning of this mediaeval revival. And he's very interested in going back to those old images, those old stories. And this is the bit, I think everything we're reading is from the Oxford Book of English Verse, so that if people at home want to read along they can.This is when the heroine of the poem is Madeline is making her escape basically. And I think this is very, very exciting. Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,Old Angela was feeling for the stair,When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware:With silver taper's light, and pious care,She turn'd, and down the aged gossip ledTo a safe level matting. Now prepare,Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd and fled.Out went the taper as she hurried in;Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:She clos'd the door, she panted, all akinTo spirits of the air, and visions wide:No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!But to her heart, her heart was voluble,Paining with eloquence her balmy side;As though a tongueless nightingale should swellHer throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,All garlanded with carven imag'riesOf fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,And diamonded with panes of quaint device,Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.I mean, so much atmosphere, so much tension, so many wonderful images just coming one after the other. The rapidity of it, the tumbling nature of it. And people often quote the Ode to autumn, which has a lot of that.James: I have to say, I found that totally enchanting. And perhaps my problem is that I need you to read it all to me. You can make an audio book that I can listen to.Henry: I honestly, I actually might read the whole of the E and put it out as audio on Substack becauseJames: I would actually listen to that.Henry: I love it so much. And I feel like it gets, when we talk about Keats, we talk about, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and Bright Star and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and these are great, great poems and they're poems that we do at school Ode to a Nightingale because I think The Great Gatsby has a big debt to Ode to a Nightingale, doesn't it? And obviously everyone quotes the Ode to Autumn. I mean, as far as I can tell, the 1st of October every year is the whole world sharing the first stands of the Ode to Autumn.James: Yeah. He may be one of the people who suffers from over familiarity perhaps. And I think also because it sounds so much what poetry is supposed to sound like, because so much of our idea of poetry derives from Keats. Maybe that's something I've slightly need to get past a little bit.Henry: But if you can get into the complete works, there are many, the bit I just read is I think quite representative.James: I loved it. I thought it was completely beautiful and I would never have thought to ever, I probably can't have read that poem for years. I wouldn't have thought to read it. Since university, I don't thinkHenry: He's one of those people. All of my copies of him are sort of frayed and the spines are breaking, but the book is wearing out. I should just commit it to memory and be done. But somehow I love going back to it. So Keats is very high in my estimation, and we've both put him higher than Shelly and Coleridge.James: Yeah.Henry: Tell me why. Because those would typically, I think, be considered the superior poets.James: Do you think Shelly? I think Keats would be considered the superior poetHenry: To Shelly?James: Certainly, yes. I think to Shelly and Coleridge, that's where current fashion would place them. I mean, I have to say Coleridge is one of my all time favourite poets. In terms of people who had just every so often think, I'd love to read a poem, I'd love to read Frost at Midnight. I'd love to read the Aeolian Harp. I'd love to read This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison. I'd love to read Kubla Khan. Outside Milton, Coleridge is probably the person that I read most, but I think, I guess there's a case that Coleridge's output is pretty slight. What his reputation rest on is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, the conversation poems, which a lot of people think are kind of plagiarised Wordsworth, at least in their style and tone, and then maybe not much else. Does anybody particularly read Cristabel and get much out of it nowadays? Dejection an Ode people like: it's never done an awful lot for me, so I sort of, in my personal Pantheon Coleridge is at the top and he's such an immensely sympathetic personality as well and such a curious person. But I think he's a little slight, and there's probably nothing in Coleridge that can match that gorgeous passage of Keats that you read. I think.Henry: Yeah, that's probably true. He's got more ideas, I guess. I don't think it matters that he's slight. Robert Frost said something about his ambition had been to lodge five or six poems in the English language, and if he'd done that, he would've achieved greatness. And obviously Frost very much did do that and is probably the most quotable and well-known poet. But I think Coleridge easily meets those criteria with the poems you described. And if all we had was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I would think it to be like Tom O' Bedlam, like the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, one of those great, great, great poems that on its own terms, deserves to be on this list.James: Yeah, and I guess another point in his favour is a great poet is they're all pretty unalike. I think if given Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a conversation poem and Kubla Khan and said, guess whether these are three separate poets or the same guy, you would say, oh, there's a totally different poems. They're three different people. One's a kind of creepy gothic horror ballad. Another one is a philosophical reflection. Another is the sort of Mad Opium dream. I mean, Kubla Khan is just without a doubt, one of the top handful of purposes in English language, I think.Henry: Oh yeah, yeah. And it has that quality of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard that so many of the lines are so quotable in the sense that they could be, in the case of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, a lot of novels did get their titles from it. I think it was James Lees Milne. Every volume of his diaries, which there are obviously quite a few, had its title from Kubla Khan. Ancient as the Hills and so on. It's one of those poems. It just provides us with so much wonderful language in the space of what a page.James: Sort of goes all over the place. Romantic chasms, Abyssinian made with dulcimer, icy pleasure dome with caves of ice. It just such a—it's so mysterious. I mean, there's nothing else remotely like it at all in English literature that I can think of, and its kind strangeness and virtuosity. I really love that poem.Henry: Now, should we say a word for Shelly? Because everyone knows Ozymandias, which is one of those internet poems that goes around a lot, but I don't know how well known the rest of his body of work is beyond that. I fell in love with him when I read a very short lyric called “To—” Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory—Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,Love itself shall slumber on.I found that to be one of those poems that was once read and immediately memorised. But he has this very, again, broad body of work. He can write about philosophical ideas, he can write about moods, he can write narrative. He wrote Julian and Maddalo, which is a dialogue poem about visiting a madman and taking sympathy with him and asking the question, who's really mad here? Very Swiftian question. He can write about the sublime in Mont Blanc. I mean, he has got huge intellectual power along with the beauty. He's what people want Tennyson to be, I guess.James: Yeah. Or what people think Byron might be. I think Shelly is great. I don't quite get that Byron is so much more famous. Shelly has just a dramatic and, well, maybe not quite just as, but an incredibly dramatic and exciting life to go along with it,Henry: I think some of the short lyrics from Byron have got much more purchase in day-to-day life, like She Walks in Beauty.James: Yeah. I think you have to maybe get Shelly a little more length, don't you? I mean, even there's something like Ode to the West Wind is you have to take the whole thing to love it, perhaps.Henry: Yes. And again, I think he's a bit like George Herbert. He's always thinking you really have to pay attention and think with him. Whereas Byron has got lots of lines you can copy out and give to a girl that you like on the bus or something.James: Yes. No, that's true.Henry: I don't mean that in quite as rude a way as it sounds. I do think that's a good thing. But Shelly's, I think, much more of a thinker, and I agree with you Childe Harold and so forth. It's all crashing bore. I might to try it again, but awful.James: I don't want move past Coledridge without inflicting little Coledridge on you. Can I?Henry: Oh, yes. No, sorry. We didn't read Coledridge, right?James: Are just, I mean, what to read from Coledridge? I mean, I could read the whole of Kubla Khan, but that would be maybe a bit boring. I mean, again, these are pretty famous and obvious lines from Frost at Midnight, which is Coledridge sitting up late at night in his cottage with his baby in its cradle, and he sort of addressing it and thinking about it. And I just think these lines are so, well, everything we've said about Coledridge, philosophical, thoughtful, beautiful, in a sort of totally knockout, undeniable way. So it goes, he's talking to his young son, I think. My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heartWith tender gladness, thus to look at thee,And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,And in far other scenes! For I was rearedIn the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligibleOf that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and all things in himself.Which is just—what aren't those lines of poetry doing? And with such kind of confidence, the way you get from talking to your baby and its cradle about what kind of upbringing you hope it will have to those flashes of, I mean quite Wordsworthian beauty, and then the sort of philosophical tone at the end. It's just such a stunning, lovely poem. Yeah, I love it.Henry: Now we both got Yeats and Hopkins. And Hopkins I think is really, really a tremendous poet, but neither of us has put Browning, which a lot of other people maybe would. Can we have a go at Browning for a minute? Can we leave him in shreds? James: Oh God. I mean, you're going to be a better advocate of Browning than I am. I've never—Henry: Don't advocate for him. No, no, no.James: We we're sticking him out.Henry: We're sticking him.James: I wonder if I even feel qualified to do that. I mean, I read quite a bit of Browning at university, found it hard to get on with sometimes. I think I found a little affected and pretentious about him and a little kind of needlessly difficult in a sort of off-puttingly Victorian way. But then I was reading, I reviewed a couple of years ago, John Carey has an excellent introduction to English poetry. I think it's called A Little History of Poetry in which he described Browning's incredibly long poem, The Ring in the Book as one of the all time wonders of verbal art. This thing is, I think it's like 700 or 800 pages long poem in the Penguin edition, which has always given me pause for thought and made me think that I've dismissed Browning out of hand because if John Carey's telling me that, then I must be wrong.But I think I have had very little pleasure out of Browning, and I mean by the end of the 19th century, there was a bit of a sort of Victorian cult of Browning, which I think was influential. And people liked him because he was a living celebrity who'd been anointed as a great poet, and people liked to go and worship at his feet and stuff. I do kind of wonder whether he's lasted, I don't think many people read him for pleasure, and I wonder if that maybe tells its own story. What's your case against Browning?Henry: No, much the same. I think he's very accomplished and very, he probably, he deserves a place on the list, but I can't enjoy him and I don't really know why. But to me, he's very clever and very good, but as you say, a bit dull.James: Yeah, I totally agree. I'm willing. It must be our failing, I'm sure. Yeah, no, I'm sure. I'm willing to believe they're all, if this podcast is listened to by scholars of Victorian poetry, they're cringing and holding their head in their hands at this—Henry: They've turned off already. Well, if you read The Ring and the Book, you can come back on and tell us about it.James: Oh God, yeah. I mean, in about 20 years time.Henry: I think we both have Auden, but you said something you said, “does Auden have an edge of fraudulence?”James: Yeah, I mean, again, I feel like I'm being really rude about a lot of poets that I really love. I don't really know why doesn't think, realising that people consider to be a little bit weak makes you appreciate their best stuff even more I guess. I mean, it's hard to make that argument without reading a bit of Auden. I wonder what bit gets it across. I haven't gotten any ready. What would you say about Auden?Henry: I love Auden. I think he was the best poet of the 20th century maybe. I mean, I have to sort of begrudgingly accept T.S. Eliot beside, I think he can do everything from, he can do songs, light lyrics, comic verse, he can do occasional poetry, obituaries. He was a political poet. He wrote in every form, I think almost literally that might be true. Every type of stanza, different lines. He was just structurally remarkable. I suspect he'll end up a bit like Pope once the culture has tur

Get out your UV lights & swabs--the queens play a game that fuses poems, then guess the poetic DNA samples. Then we spark up a fusion of a different strain!Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Pretty Please.....Buy our books:     Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.     James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.SHOW NOTES:Watch Jools Lebron get mindful and demure here, divaDon't soak tampons in vodka. Poems we discuss in the episode include:Philip Levine's "Bitterness"Laura Kasischke's "Champagne"Kay Ryan's "Shark's Teeth"Kenneth Koch's "One Train May Hide Another"Annie Finch's "Wild Yeasts"Dorothea Lasky's "Toast to my friend or why Friendship is the best kind of Love"Danusha Laméris's "Bonfire Opera"Marie Ponsot's "Among Women"Tina Chang's "God Country"Campbell McGrath's "Sunset, Route 90, Brewster County, Texas"Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish"W.B. Yeats's "Leda and the Swan"Gerard Manley Hopkins's "The Windhover"Anne Sexton's "Jesus Awake" & "Wanting to Die" Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" & "I, Too"Philip Larkin's "Sad Steps" And Beyonce's "You Won't Break My Soul [Queens Remix]," in which she sampled Madonna's song "Vogue," returning it to the culture where it rightly belongs.

“Kurt” has had unexplained encounters since he was a kid that have continued throughout his life. In this episode, he takes us on a journey from the mountains of Alaska to the deserts of New Mexico. As a traveler who is often on the road, he spends most of his time alone. That is when strange encounters seem to find him, including UFO's, Mothman and Dogman. We talk and theorize about the mystery of why Kurt sees what he does. Is his perception common? Or does he see what most are too afraid to see?"The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper" — W.B. Yeats

Willam Butler Yeats wrote a poem about how living by a lake, and the water lapping with low sounds on the shore, brought a deep peace to his heart. In Luke chapter 5 Jesus teaches by the lakeside. Let's gather with him by the water this weekend and as Yeats put it we “shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.”

Yeats poetry extract

Send us a textOn today's episode, Janey is going to tell us about a woman with a deadly bush, and Max is going to give us some tips on how to get rid of uninvited guests! Enjoy!Janey's Sources - The Snow, The Crow, and the BloodFull free story Wikipedia entry on “The Grateful Dead” motif  Max's Sources - The Horned Women "Fairy Tales of Ireland" by W. B. Yeats, illustrated by P. J. Lynch  Full free text of “The Horned Women” by Lady Jane Francesca Wilde from “Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms & Superstitions of Ireland with Sketches of the Irish Past” Support the showCheck out our books (and support local bookstores!) on our Bookshop.org affiliate account!Starting your own podcast with your very cool best friend? Try hosting on Buzzsprout (and get a $20 Amazon gift card!)Want more??Visit our website!Join our Patreon!Shop the merch at TeePublic!If you liked these stories, let us know on our various socials!InstagramTiktokGoodreadsAnd email us at sortofthestory@gmail.com

Nick is joined by RTE and Racing TV broadcaster Jane Mangan to discuss the latest from around the racing world. On today's show, Emmet Mullins has news of Corbetts Cross (Gold Cup), Noble Yeats (edging towards retirement) and Jeroboam Machin (sidelined). Plus, Dan Skelton explains why L'Eau du Sud is not running at Windsor this weekend, while Naohiro Goda fills us in on intriguing Japanese Champion Hurdle entry All the World. Jockey Club Head of Racing Jon Pullin tells us why reserves are back in the Grand National, 1/ST Racing's Aidan Butler talks about the wildfire relief efforts at Santa Anita Park, plus JA McGrath has the latest from Hong Kong.

Released in October 1988, Fisherman's Blues marked a significant departure for The Waterboys, showcasing a rich blend of Celtic folk, country, and rock influences. The album is a soulful exploration of frontman Mike Scott's evolving musical vision, moving away from the "big music" sound of their earlier records toward a more organic and roots-oriented style.The title track, "Fisherman's Blues," is a heartfelt anthem that combines yearning lyrics with a stirring violin melody, capturing the album's central themes of wanderlust and spiritual searching. Other standout tracks include their reinterpretation of Van Morrison's "Sweet Thing," the poignant "And a Bang on the Ear," and the haunting "The Stolen Child," which features W.B. Yeats' poetry set to music.The album was recorded across several years in Ireland and California, lending it an eclectic, yet cohesive feel. It's a celebration of tradition, storytelling, and musical camaraderie, earning Fisherman's Blues its place as a beloved classic in The Waterboys' discography and a touchstone for fans of genre-blending folk-rock.Listen to the album on Apple Music Listen to the album on Spotify What did you think of this album? Send us a text! All About M.E. PODCAST Welcome to the "All About M.E. Podcast ," the podcast where music meets the...Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the showPatreonWebsitePolyphonic Press SubredditFollow us on InstagramContact: polyphonicpressmusic@gmail.comDISCLAIMER: Due to copyright restrictions, we are unable to play pieces of the songs we cover in these episodes. Playing clips of songs are unfortunately prohibitively expensive to obtain the proper licensing. We strongly encourage you to listen to the album along with us on your preferred format to enhance the listening experience.

Poetry by Yeats. Enjoy

A re-presentation of my Poetry for Men episode from October 2022 featuring William Butler Yeats' "A Dialogue of Self and Soul."I return to new episodes, interviews, and guests next week, on January 10, 2025.Happy New Year, and see you then.- WillRead "A Dialogue of Self and Soul"

jQuery(document).ready(function(){ cab.clickify(); }); Original Podcast with clickable words https://tinyurl.com/2d52u8pp Contact: irishlingos@gmail.com New information about WB Yeats' remains available in State documents. Eolas nua faoi thaisí WB Yeats ar fáil i gcáipéisí an Stáit. RTÉ News and Current Affairs The Department of Foreign Affairs decided to suppress information given to them in the late seventies about the remains of the poet WB Yeats. Nuacht agus Cúrsaí Reatha RTÉ Chinn an Roinn Gnóthaí Eachtracha eolas a tugadh dóibh ag deireadh na seachtóidí faoi thaisí an fhile W B Yeats a chur faoi chois. In fact, the Department thought that a member of the famous Gluckstein family in London was blackmailing the State when he claimed to have evidence that the bones were not WB's. Go deimhin, shíl an Roinn go raibh ball de theaghlach cáiliúil Gluckstein i Londain ag déanamh dúmhál ar an Stát nuair a mhaígh sé go raibh fianaise aige nárbh iad cnámha W.B. Yeats was buried in Sligo. Yeats a bhí curtha i Sligeach. It emerged 10 years ago in French State documents that the remains buried in the cemetery in Drumcliabh in Sligo are unlikely to be those of WB Yeats. Tháinig sé chun solais 10 mbliana ó shin i gcáipéisí Stáit de chuid na Fraince nach dócha gur taisí W B Yeats atá curtha sa reilig i nDroim Chliabh i Sligeach. The poet died in Roquebrune, France, in 1939 and was buried in a pauper's grave. Cailleadh an file i Roquebrune na Fraince sa bhliain 1939 agus cuireadh é in uaigh bhochtáin. A grand ceremony was held in Ireland in 1948 when a naval ship brought his remains back to his homeland. Reáchtáladh searmanas mór in Éirinn in 1948 nuair a thug long cabhlaigh a chuid taisí ar ais go dtí a thír dhúchais. He was buried in Drumcliabh in County Sligo with great pomp and ceremony. Cuireadh é i nDroim Chliabh i gContae Shligigh le mustar is mórdháil. But Yeats' remains were so mixed with many others in the morgue that there was no way to distinguish them from other people buried there. Ach b'amhlaidh go raibh taisí Yeats measctha le go leor eile sa mharbhlann agus nach raibh aon dóigh go bhféadfaí idirdhealú a dhéanamh idir iad agus daoine eile a bhí curtha ann. The pauper's grave had a five-year lease and was exhumed in 1946 and the poet's bones were interred with those of many others. Bhí léas cúig bliana ar uaigh an bhochtáin agus dí-adhlacadh é i 1946 agus cuireadh cnámha an fhile isteach le cnámha go leor daoine eile. Therefore, it is unlikely that the collection of bones sent back to Ireland belonged to Yeats at all. Mar sin, ní dócha gur le Yeats an cnuasach cnámha a seoladh ar ais go hÉirinn in aon chor. A Department of Foreign Affairs file now available in the National Archives due to the 30 Year Rule, provides fresh insight into the controversy. Tugann comhad de chuid na Roinne Gnóthaí Eachtracha atá ar fáil anois sa Chartlann Náisiúnta de bharr na Rialach 30 Bliain, léargas úr ar an chonspóid. On June 29, 1978, the Irish Ambassador to Britain submitted a confidential report to the Department on the matter. An 29 Meitheamh, 1978 chuir Ambasadóir na hÉireann chun na Breataine tuairisc rúnda faoi bhráid na Roinne faoin scéal. A member of the Gluckstein family contacted Ambassador Paul Keating with updated information about the situation. Chuaigh ball de theaghlach Gluckstein i dteagmháil leis an ambasadóir Paul Keating le heolas úr faoin scéal. Aunt R. was Bhí aintín R. J. J. Gluckstein (Ms Gluck) was very close to Edith Heald, a close friend of Yeats. Gluckstein (Ms Gluck) an-mhór le Edith Heald, dlúthchara de chuid Yeats. Heald had documents in his possession relating to Yeats' burial and these were left in Ms Gluck's will. Bhí doiciméid i seilbh Heald a bhain le hadhlacadh Yeats agus fágadh iad sin le huacht ag Ms Gluck. Gluckstein handed copies of these letters to the Ambassador. Thug Gluckstein cóipeanna de na litreacha seo ar lámh don Ambasadóir.

It starts with W.B. Yeats. This week, using word p0rn, I teach you how to train your ear to the sounds around you, how to use consonance, assonance, alliteration and onomatopoeia to sexify your speaking and writing, and I give you a mini-masterclass on pitch techniques in English. If you are are developing your English proficiency, or helping people to do so; if you are a public speaker, want to improve your public speaking or presentation skills, or become a better poet or writer, this episode is for you.Support the PodcastShare your thoughts on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This hour we take your calls about anything you want to talk about.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a world full of Yeats and Cartis, Cordae is a rapper that has stayed true to the lyrical styles popularized by a past generation of rappers. On this episode, J. Mac & Ryder breakdown his newest project: Crossroads and discuss where Cordae sits among today's best rappers.

Amanda Holmes reads W. B. Yeats's “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you'll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman.This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

is life of globetrotting the globe was not the one he expected to lead. He grew up a quiet, shy boy teased by other kids on the playgrounds for his red hair. But he developed a keen wit and sense of humor to always see the funnier side of life. With an overwhelming love of travel, a propensity to find trouble where there was none, and being a passionate advocate of mental health, Simon's stories will leave a reader either rolling on the floor in tears of laughter, or breathing deeply that the adventures he has led were survived. No author has laughed longer or cried with less restraint at the travails of life.

Explicit Language in this episode-Simon Yeats was born in Australia, sent to boarding school, graduated university and ended up in the United States. Not a typical upbringing, but it was an upbringing that helped Simon discover the world of travel.As Simon relates his life experience, he talks about helping folks with spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries. These are often patient's whose doctors have said would not recover yet Simon has been instrumental in several amazing recoveries.One sad experience is Simon's relationship with his son and the difficulties he's had in attempting to have a relationship with him.Once again, Simon has traveled extensively, and he recalls an experience in Hawaii that was not typical at all. If you'd like to check out Simon's humorous travel books, here's the link: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Simon-Yeats/author/B0CBNQLSPW?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Simon Yeats has 3 distinct sides to his life. His funny side, his serious side and his dark side. In each case, his experiences are unique.Funny Side: Birth by Fire in his travel escapades around the world and then writing books to tell all. How to maybe avoid mistakes and survive.Serious Side: Helping people walk again and bringing some back to life.Dark Side:  Facing death 10 times. Mental health issues. Kidnapping of son.After an unbelievable life packed ful of incidences, he is lucky to be alive.Hear about his escapades in Rio, Brazil. Hoping he may settle down and chill out now. I need a rest just listening to him.Check out his books on Amazon. Best enjoyed after a few beers.http://www.malcolmteasdale.com

We all have two lives. We only get to experience living in the second after we realize we only have just one.Simon Yeats had his first real scare in life when he was attacked by a kangaroo when he was seven years old. His first brush with the cliff-face edge of death came when he was 12. His father drove his family down the dangerous, 4WD only Skipper's Canyon dirt road in New Zealand in a rented minivan.Including the occasions he was almost involved in two different plane flight crashes, in the same night, there have been at least a half dozen more times when the author has come within a moment's inattention of being killed.However, none of those frightening incidents compare to what he experiences after his son is abducted to South America.

Introduced by John Low Narrated by John Kavanagh Read by Jim Norton • Denys Hawthorne Nicholas Boulton • Marcella Riordan William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house in County Sligo. The young Yeats was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His early poetry was influenced by John Keats, William Wordsworth, William Blake and many more. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Sing. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. After 1910, Yeats's dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.

durée : 00:12:14 - "Upon Silence" : Georges Benjamin - Susan Bickley et l'Ensemble Fretwork - Upon Silence met en scène Long-legged Fly, un poème tardif de Yeats qui dépeint trois personnages marquants de l'histoire absorbés dans une contemplation silencieuse.

Today's poem demonstrates that, unlike Arnold's sideburns, loving the Bard never goes out of style. Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold, born in Laleham, Middlesex, on December 24, 1822, began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics.After marrying in 1851, Arnold began work as a government school inspector, a grueling position which nonetheless afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout England and the Continent. Throughout his thirty-five years in this position Arnold developed an interest in education, an interest which fed into both his critical works and his poetry. Empedocles on Etna (1852) and Poems (1853) established Arnold's reputation as a poet and, in 1857, he was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. During this time Arnold wrote the bulk of his most famous critical works, Essays in Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he sets forth ideas that greatly reflect the predominant values of the Victorian era.Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold's poetry often wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. In “To Marguerite—Continued,” for example, Arnold revises John Donne's assertion that “No man is an island,” suggesting that we “mortals” are indeed “in the sea of life enisled.” Other well-known poems, such as “Dover Beach,” link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity. His most influential essays, however, were those on literary topics. In “The Function of Criticism” (1865) and “The Study of Poetry” (1880) Arnold called for a new epic poetry: a poetry that would address the moral needs of his readers, “to animate and ennoble them.” Arnold's arguments, for a renewed religious faith and an adoption of classical aesthetics and morals, are particularly representative of mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. His approach—his gentlemanly and subtle style—to these issues, however, established criticism as an art form, and has influenced almost every major English critic since, including T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom. Though perhaps less obvious, the tremendous influence of his poetry, which addresses the poet's most innermost feelings with complete transparency, can easily be seen in writers as different from each other as W. B. Yeats, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Sharon Olds. Late in life, in 1883 and 1886, Arnold made two lecturing tours of the United States.Matthew Arnold died in Liverpool on April 15, 1888.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

This is a re-release of my discussion with Ross McDonnell. His film, SWIFT JUSTICE, is up for a News & Doc Emmy in Outstanding Cinematography: Documentary. The awards will be revealed live on September 26, 2024.Ross died on November 5, 2023. His co-director, Victor Blue, writes movingly about his work. Later on this year, I'll post an episode remembering Ross and the legacy of independent filmmakers.In this episode, I talk with Ross McDonnell, co-director of the new documentary short, SWIFT JUSTICE, about Sharia justice in Afghanistan.Ross and I discuss:how he got started in filmmaking;whether some people are just built for the visual arts;the gear behind making a film like SWIFT JUSTICE and how they went about filming "without understanding what was happening in realtime"the importance of Christmas movies in Ireland and W.B. Yeats;never-ending praise for editors and the New Yorker's prowess in the documentary realm;what's next for the documentary field.Ross' Indie Film Highlight: Jonathan Glazer; Wong Kar-wai; Spize Jonze; Chris Cunningham; Floria Sigismondi; Chris Doyle; Lance AcordLinks:SWIFT Justice Film Watch The News & Doc Emmys Live On September 26, 2024 Support the Podcast Through MembershipSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/first-time-go/exclusive-content

Dave Davis covers today's LFC news, stories and content. As sadly Liverpool legend Ron Yeats has passed away. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On episode 132 Louis Bayard discusses his latest historical novel, The Wildes: a novel in five acts. We talk about our shared affinity for Oscar Wilde, Bayyard's favorite work of Wilde's and we share some recent reads we loved. In addition, Shannon Bowring, author of Where the Forest Meets the River recommends a favorite read. Books Recommended:The Wildes: A Novel In Five Acts by Louis BayardJames by Percival EverettPeggy by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison This is Happiness by Niall Williams Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan The Screw Tape Letters by C.S. LewisMad, Bad and Dangerous to Know : the Fathers of Wilde , Yeats and Joyce by Colm Toibin Louis bayard on social media:Facebook: Louis bayardInstagram:  @louisbayardauthorThreads: @louisbayyardauthorWhere the Forest Meets the River by Shannon BowringThe Woods by Janice ObuchowskySupport the showGet your Books Are My People coffee mug here!I hope you all have a wonderfully bookish week!

#3914 (86.29% 622 left): Sep. 1, 2024: Autumn is over the long leaves that love us (again from W.B.Yeats from Aug. 28, 2024) Today's pure primal piano music here. Happy if this music makes you feel peaceful.. : ) Looking for absolute natural beauty every day for Piano Ten Thousand Leaves. Target number is 4536: This piece may might have good 1/f fluctuation characteristic although I stopped investigating it each piece. My new message: "Does it make sense to preserve it for 1000 years? Today's cover ART is created by #Midjourney (Art Generating #AI), according to my wish. Happy if you like it. spotify playlist 18 hours 449 songs, makes you fully relaxed. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0RCxA8SaySzoFzpQmTCLfo?si=92c44191513340ff Recent My Weekly Video Magazine of piano ten thousand leaves https://youtu.be/yCCufZCMnDQ?si=pLt98vOleJcioH-m Weekly Piano Ten Thousand Leaves Magazine ; super beautiful video .. https://youtu.be/nn5_M4Nrvhg?si=N7hL_xrnDqc46si_ ====== Piano Ten Thousand Leaves - Tweets Creation Note: An epic story of wandering music creation https://a.co/d/0RN78Ga ( 1.36US$ #amazon #kindle, #Paperback also available: 20.11US$) ====== I'm now making Archive site of Piano Ten Thousand Leaves project by utilizing #wordpress. Basically nice direction I've already gotten.. : ) Currently 1100 pieces already achieved. But this week I need to do something else, so I'm going to stop this task for a bit. ######## NEW 27th SELECTION ALBUM JUST RELEASED ######## "Thousand Years Slumber" - the 27th selection album of piano ten thousand leaves youtube: FULL VIDEO with 20 full songs in very high quality sounds https://youtu.be/iBbCbNpxD3U?si=Hg6WWu4hV6qP1c-D spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0cJbK83sUPo0FdsfElwmw8?si=-A46B7V-Qj-zIQWOEh8V-g appleMusic: https://music.apple.com/jp/album/thousand-years-slumber/1756622015 amazonMusic: https://www.amazon.com/music/player/albums/B0D971MC37?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=tcjaz-22&linkCode=ur2&camp=247&creative=1211 all music streaming services: https://linkco.re/FGZDZn9u

#3913 (86.27% 623 left): Aug. 31, 2024: The hour of the waning of love has beset us (again from W.B.Yeats from Aug. 28, 2024) Today's pure primal piano music here. Happy if this music makes you feel peaceful.. : ) Looking for absolute natural beauty every day for Piano Ten Thousand Leaves. Target number is 4536: This piece may might have good 1/f fluctuation characteristic although I stopped investigating it each piece. My new message: "Does it make sense to preserve it for 1000 years? Today's cover ART is created by #Midjourney (Art Generating #AI), according to my wish. Happy if you like it. spotify playlist 18 hours 449 songs, makes you fully relaxed. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0RCxA8SaySzoFzpQmTCLfo?si=92c44191513340ff Recent My Weekly Video Magazine of piano ten thousand leaves https://youtu.be/yCCufZCMnDQ?si=pLt98vOleJcioH-m Weekly Piano Ten Thousand Leaves Magazine ; super beautiful video .. https://youtu.be/nn5_M4Nrvhg?si=N7hL_xrnDqc46si_ ====== Piano Ten Thousand Leaves - Tweets Creation Note: An epic story of wandering music creation https://a.co/d/0RN78Ga ( 1.36US$ #amazon #kindle, #Paperback also available: 20.11US$) ====== I'm now making Archive site of Piano Ten Thousand Leaves project by utilizing #wordpress. Basically nice direction I've already gotten.. : ) Currently 1100 pieces already achieved. But this week I need to do something else, so I'm going to stop this task for a bit. ######## NEW 27th SELECTION ALBUM JUST RELEASED ######## "Thousand Years Slumber" - the 27th selection album of piano ten thousand leaves youtube: FULL VIDEO with 20 full songs in very high quality sounds https://youtu.be/iBbCbNpxD3U?si=Hg6WWu4hV6qP1c-D spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0cJbK83sUPo0FdsfElwmw8?si=-A46B7V-Qj-zIQWOEh8V-g appleMusic: https://music.apple.com/jp/album/thousand-years-slumber/1756622015 amazonMusic: https://www.amazon.com/music/player/albums/B0D971MC37?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=tcjaz-22&linkCode=ur2&camp=247&creative=1211 all music streaming services:

Piano Ten Thousand Leaves - Creation Note: An epic story of wandering music creation https://a.co/d/0RN78Ga 1.36US$ #amazon #kindle #3912 (86.24% 624 left): Aug. 30, 2024: The falling of the leaves (again from W.B.Yeats from Aug. 28, 2024) Today's pure primal piano music here. Happy if this music makes you feel peaceful.. : ) Looking for absolute natural beauty every day for Piano Ten Thousand Leaves. Target number is 4536: This piece may might have good 1/f fluctuation characteristic although I stopped investigating it each piece. My new message: "Does it make sense to preserve it for 1000 years? Today's cover ART is created by #Midjourney (Art Generating #AI), according to my wish. Happy if you like it. spotify playlist 18 hours 449 songs, makes you fully relaxed. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0RCxA8SaySzoFzpQmTCLfo?si=92c44191513340ff Recent My Weekly Video Magazine of piano ten thousand leaves https://youtu.be/yCCufZCMnDQ?si=pLt98vOleJcioH-m Weekly Piano Ten Thousand Leaves Magazine ; super beautiful video .. https://youtu.be/nn5_M4Nrvhg?si=N7hL_xrnDqc46si_ ====== Piano Ten Thousand Leaves - Tweets Creation Note: An epic story of wandering music creation https://a.co/d/0RN78Ga ( 1.36US$ #amazon #kindle, #Paperback also available: 20.11US$) ====== I'm now making Archive site of Piano Ten Thousand Leaves project by utilizing #wordpress. Basically nice direction I've already gotten.. : ) Currently 1100 pieces already achieved. But this week I need to do something else, so I'm going to stop this task for a bit. ######## NEW 27th SELECTION ALBUM JUST RELEASED ######## "Thousand Years Slumber" - the 27th selection album of piano ten thousand leaves youtube: FULL VIDEO with 20 full songs in very high quality sounds https://youtu.be/iBbCbNpxD3U?si=Hg6WWu4hV6qP1c-D spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0cJbK83sUPo0FdsfElwmw8?si=-A46B7V-Qj-zIQWOEh8V-g appleMusic: https://music.apple.com/jp/album/thousand-years-slumber/1756622015 amazonMusic: https://www.amazon.com/music/player/albums/B0D971MC37?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=tcjaz-22&linkCode=ur2&camp=247&creative=1211 all music streaming services: https://linkco.re/FGZDZn9u

#3911 (86.22% 625 left): Aug. 28, 2024: The consciousness (again from W.B.Yeats from Aug. 28, 2024) Today's pure primal piano music here. Happy if this music makes you feel peaceful.. : ) Looking for absolute natural beauty every day for Piano Ten Thousand Leaves. Target number is 4536: This piece may might have good 1/f fluctuation characteristic although I stopped investigating it each piece. My new message: "Does it make sense to preserve it for 1000 years? Today's cover ART is created by #Midjourney (Art Generating #AI), according to my wish. Happy if you like it. spotify playlist 18 hours 449 songs, makes you fully relaxed. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0RCxA8SaySzoFzpQmTCLfo?si=92c44191513340ff Recent My Weekly Video Magazine of piano ten thousand leaves https://youtu.be/yCCufZCMnDQ?si=pLt98vOleJcioH-m Weekly Piano Ten Thousand Leaves Magazine ; super beautiful video .. https://youtu.be/nn5_M4Nrvhg?si=N7hL_xrnDqc46si_ ====== Piano Ten Thousand Leaves - Tweets Creation Note: An epic story of wandering music creation https://a.co/d/0RN78Ga ( 1.36US$ #amazon #kindle, #Paperback also available: 20.11US$) ====== I'm now making Archive site of Piano Ten Thousand Leaves project by utilizing #wordpress. Basically nice direction I've already gotten.. : ) Currently 1100 pieces already achieved. But this week I need to do something else, so I'm going to stop this task for a bit. ######## NEW 27th SELECTION ALBUM JUST RELEASED ######## "Thousand Years Slumber" - the 27th selection album of piano ten thousand leaves youtube: FULL VIDEO with 20 full songs in very high quality sounds https://youtu.be/iBbCbNpxD3U?si=Hg6WWu4hV6qP1c-D spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0cJbK83sUPo0FdsfElwmw8?si=-A46B7V-Qj-zIQWOEh8V-g appleMusic: https://music.apple.com/jp/album/thousand-years-slumber/1756622015 amazonMusic: https://www.amazon.com/music/player/albums/B0D971MC37?&_encoding=UTF8&tag=tcjaz-22&linkCode=ur2&camp=247&creative=1211 all music streaming services: https://linkco.re/FGZDZn9u

Comedian Raanan Hershberg joins the program to discuss his favorite problematic artists and why he doesn't respect Jackson Pollock. Watch Raanan's new special, BRAVE. "The Connoisseur", by Normal Rockwell. "When You Are Old", by W.B. Yeats. Produced by G34 Productions. Filmed at Grove 34 in Astoria, Queens.

This is Ryan McCarty's 28th NYTimes crossword, almost all of which (23, to be precise) have appeared on this very day -- Saturday. The clues were quite nice -- include a few gems, like the placement of 30A, "Pleeeeeeease?", CANTI adjacent to 31A, Spiteful, as a comment, CATTY; 41A, Bus. driver, CEO (oh, very nice!);  43A, Hardly open, CAGEY (clever, clever!), and finally 5D, Strong, as a bond, AAA (

Here I read the all time classic, Awakened Imagination, Neville Goddard expounds upon his belief that to realize your desire an action must start in your imagination. Illuminated by quotations from Yeats, Blake, and the Bible as well as accounts of his personal experiences, Neville will show you:    How to cultivate your imagination   How to revise your attitude   How to attract what you want   How to fulfill your desires. This is Neville's classic guide to using your imagination. ”Man attracts what he is," Neville writes. "The art of life is to sustain the feeling of the wish fulfilled and let things come to you." 

What was the deal with the Victorians and their obsession with reanimating corpses? How did writers like Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others breathe life into the undead - and why did they do it? We can attribute their efforts to the present's desire to remake the past in its own image - but what does that mean exactly? In this episode, Jacke talks to Professor Renée Fox about her book The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature. PLUS Jacke explores what notable German-Swiss author Herman Hesse learned from trees. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While he may technically practice as a photographer, artist, and architect, Hiroshi Sugimoto could also be considered, from a wider-lens perspective, a chronicler of time. With a body of work now spanning nearly five decades, Sugimoto began making pictures in earnest in 1976 with his ongoing “Diorama” series. In 1980, he started what may be his most widely recognized series, “Seascapes,” composed of Rothko-esque abstractions of the ocean that he has taken at roughly 250 locations around the world. In more recent years, Sugimoto has also built a flourishing architectural practice, designing everything from a café in Tokyo to the currently-under-construction Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. As with his subtly profound work, Sugimoto bears tremendous wisdom and is regarded by many as one of the most deeply perceptive minds and practitioners at the intersection of time and art-making.On the episode, he discusses his pictures as fossilizations of time; seascapes as the least spoiled places on Earth; and why, for him, the “target of completion” for a building is 5,000 years from now.Special thanks to our Season 9 presenting sponsor, L'École, School of Jewelry Arts.Show notes:Hiroshi Sugimoto[5:10] Pre-Photography Time-Recording Devices[39:05] “Theaters”[15:06] “Seascapes”[32:31] “Diorama”[17:16] Caspar David Friedrich[25:14] Odawara[28:52] “Aujourd'hui le monde est mort [Lost Human Genetic Archive]”[44:19] “Abandoned Theaters”[44:19] “Opera Houses”[44:19] “Drive-In Theaters”[49:52] “Architecture”[51:12] Le Corbusier[51:12] Mies van der Rohe[55:30] New Material Research Laboratory[55:30] Tomoyuki Sakakida[59:23] Enoura Observatory[59:23] Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden[1:00:48] Katsura Imperial Villa[1:01:05] Bruno Taut[1:02:14] Donald Judd[1:02:14] “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Five Elements in Optical Glass”[1:06:47] Mingei[1:06:47] Isamu Noguchi[1:06:47] Dan Flavin[1:09:15] Sugimoto Bunraku Sonezaki Shinju: The Love Suicides at Sonezaki[1:09:15] At the Hawk's Well[1:09:15] W.B. Yeats

Irish poet W. B. Yeats wanted to be buried “Under Ben Bulben,” a stately mountain after which he titled one of his last poems. The poem’s final line is etched onto his gravestone: Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death./ Horseman, pass by! Much speculation has taken place over what this means. Perhaps it’s the poet’s acknowledgment of the reality of both life and death. Regardless, Yeats got his wish about where he was buried and what his gravestone would say. But the cold truth is that life goes on without us, indifferent to our departure. During a dire time in Judah’s history, Shebna, a “palace administrator,” made a tomb for himself to insure his legacy after death. But God, through His prophet Isaiah, told Shebna, “Who gave you permission to cut out a grave for yourself here, hewing your grave on the height and chiseling your resting place in the rock?” (Isaiah 22:16). The prophet told him, “[God] will roll you up tightly like a ball and throw you into a large country. There you will die” (v. 18). Shebna had missed the point. What matters isn’t where we’re buried; what matters in life is who we serve. Those who serve Jesus have this immeasurable comfort: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord” (Revelation 14:13). We serve a God who’s never indifferent to our “departure.” He anticipates our arrival and welcomes us home.