This essay addresses Yeats’s negotiation of poetry’s relationship, during the 1930s, with the emerging mass culture. Rather than contextualizing Yeats’s view on the future with a traditional critical framework such as Romantic apocalyptical discourse, a closeness to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and dystopian novels is explored. The main focus is on an unfinished draft for A Vision, “Michael Robartes Foretells,” and the way it envisages the changing situation for literature at the end of an epoch. Yeats’s use of classical parallels and linking of poetry and cinema are given special attention. His suggestion that the poetry of the future may be affected by the emergent medium of cinema provides an ambivalent perspective, not simply suggesting the degeneration of poetry in a context of Americanized mass culture but also possibilities of metamorphosis and spirituality. The interpretation of “Michael Robartes Foretells” is framed by other examples of Yeats’s engagement with mass media in the 1930s, in the form of Virginia Woolf’s diary report of table talk and Yeats’s radio broadcasts. All in all, Yeats’s view on poetry’s position balances between a conservative fear of marginalization and a more hopeful view of its potential to reinvent itself in a new historical context.
{"title":"\"Some Ovid of the Films\": W. B. Yeats, Mass Media, and the Future of Poetry in the 1930s","authors":"C. Armstrong","doi":"10.34068/IYS.03.01.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/IYS.03.01.04","url":null,"abstract":"This essay addresses Yeats’s negotiation of poetry’s relationship, during the 1930s, with the emerging mass culture. Rather than contextualizing Yeats’s view on the future with a traditional critical framework such as Romantic apocalyptical discourse, a closeness to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and dystopian novels is explored. The main focus is on an unfinished draft for A Vision, “Michael Robartes Foretells,” and the way it envisages the changing situation for literature at the end of an epoch. Yeats’s use of classical parallels and linking of poetry and cinema are given special attention. His suggestion that the poetry of the future may be affected by the emergent medium of cinema provides an ambivalent perspective, not simply suggesting the degeneration of poetry in a context of Americanized mass culture but also possibilities of metamorphosis and spirituality. The interpretation of “Michael Robartes Foretells” is framed by other examples of Yeats’s engagement with mass media in the 1930s, in the form of Virginia Woolf’s diary report of table talk and Yeats’s radio broadcasts. All in all, Yeats’s view on poetry’s position balances between a conservative fear of marginalization and a more hopeful view of its potential to reinvent itself in a new historical context.","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127470297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In a series of radio broadcasts from 1931 to 1937, Yeats presented several of his poems about the Easter Rising but, curiously, not his most famous Rising poem, “Easter, 1916.” The poems he chose, as well as those he omitted, reveal his understanding of radio’s commemorative properties. Radio’s ephemerality and its intimacy were especially well-suited for Yeats’s minor poems, which were better able to present shifting perspectives on the Rising from the vantage of the present moment, unlike “Easter, 1916,” which was quickly settling into the canonical version of the event. Through multiple broadcasts responding to historical developments, Yeats presented new perspectives on the Rising and emphasized the event’s changing meaning. Yeats recognized the role of mass media in shaping historical memory and was early to see the radio as a key medium for reframing the Rising as it began to settle into history. Broadcasting his 1916 poems provided a means for Yeats to subtly alter previous statements on the Rising during the early years of the Irish Free State and to re-contextualize some of his own earlier work.
{"title":"Broadcasting the Rising: Yeats and Radio Commemoration","authors":"E. Bloom","doi":"10.34068/IYS.03.01.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/IYS.03.01.02","url":null,"abstract":"In a series of radio broadcasts from 1931 to 1937, Yeats presented several of his poems about the Easter Rising but, curiously, not his most famous Rising poem, “Easter, 1916.” The poems he chose, as well as those he omitted, reveal his understanding of radio’s commemorative properties. Radio’s ephemerality and its intimacy were especially well-suited for Yeats’s minor poems, which were better able to present shifting perspectives on the Rising from the vantage of the present moment, unlike “Easter, 1916,” which was quickly settling into the canonical version of the event. Through multiple broadcasts responding to historical developments, Yeats presented new perspectives on the Rising and emphasized the event’s changing meaning. Yeats recognized the role of mass media in shaping historical memory and was early to see the radio as a key medium for reframing the Rising as it began to settle into history. Broadcasting his 1916 poems provided a means for Yeats to subtly alter previous statements on the Rising during the early years of the Irish Free State and to re-contextualize some of his own earlier work.","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126154053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yeats made a small but interesting set of contributions to the avant-garde US periodical the Little Review, a journal for which Ezra Pound acted as ‘Foreign Editor’ and an important locus for modernist literature. My essay explores the range of Yeats’s contributions, and Pound’s rationale for being editorially involved. It examines editorial attitudes to the First World War, particularly in 1917, and the version of ‘In Memory of Robert Gregory’ which Yeats placed in the journal. By focusing on such specific moments and small textual details, the essay close reads what Sean Latham has described as “emergence,” “a particular kind of complexity that arises not from the individual elements of a system, but only from their interaction.”
{"title":"Yeats, Pound, and the Little Review, 1914-1918","authors":"Clare Hutton","doi":"10.34068/IYS.03.01.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/IYS.03.01.03","url":null,"abstract":"Yeats made a small but interesting set of contributions to the avant-garde US periodical the Little Review, a journal for which Ezra Pound acted as ‘Foreign Editor’ and an important locus for modernist literature. My essay explores the range of Yeats’s contributions, and Pound’s rationale for being editorially involved. It examines editorial attitudes to the First World War, particularly in 1917, and the version of ‘In Memory of Robert Gregory’ which Yeats placed in the journal. By focusing on such specific moments and small textual details, the essay close reads what Sean Latham has described as “emergence,” “a particular kind of complexity that arises not from the individual elements of a system, but only from their interaction.”","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126790914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Review of Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions","authors":"Soudabeh Ananisarab","doi":"10.34068/IYS.03.01.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/IYS.03.01.06","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"44 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134260753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
W. B. Yeats’s pursuit of an audience led him into the world of mass media—a landscape populated first by newspapers and later by radios, which he learned to navigate with shrewdness and skill. The purpose of this special issue is to examine Yeats’s various ventures in mass communication. Enlisting a broad range of critical approaches, contributors to this volume show how the demands of print journalism and radio broadcasting informed Yeats’s poetics, his thinking about the social vocation of art, and his ideas about how literature might be best received and structured. The essays also examine the reception and legacies of Yeats’s experiments with mass media, showing how he was at once self-consciously archaic and exultantly avant-garde. This article provides an introduction to this special volume of International Yeats Studies and attendant critical concerns.
{"title":"Introduction: Yeats and Mass Communications","authors":"David Dwan, Émilie Morin","doi":"10.34068/IYS.03.01.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/IYS.03.01.01","url":null,"abstract":"W. B. Yeats’s pursuit of an audience led him into the world of mass media—a landscape populated first by newspapers and later by radios, which he learned to navigate with shrewdness and skill. The purpose of this special issue is to examine Yeats’s various ventures in mass communication. Enlisting a broad range of critical approaches, contributors to this volume show how the demands of print journalism and radio broadcasting informed Yeats’s poetics, his thinking about the social vocation of art, and his ideas about how literature might be best received and structured. The essays also examine the reception and legacies of Yeats’s experiments with mass media, showing how he was at once self-consciously archaic and exultantly avant-garde. This article provides an introduction to this special volume of International Yeats Studies and attendant critical concerns.","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117268543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Much has been written about the right-wing politics and eugenicist sympathies of Yeats’s late-1930s poetry in general and about On the Boiler in particular. Yeats’s focus on Ireland’s degeneration and his calls for its regeneration through cultural (and even biological methods) coincided with his dalliance with the Irish Blueshirts and his frustrations with the transformations of the Irish Free State under Éamon de Valera. However, these years also proved to be Yeats’s most active in terms of radio broadcasting, with six of his nine broadcasts made between 1937 and 1938. In this essay, I read Yeats’s broadcasts, in particular “In the Poet’s Pub,” “In the Poet’s Parlour,” and “My Own Poetry” alongside On the Boiler to show how themes of degeneration and regeneration link these works. As a medium, radio could advance the cultural degeneration and pandering to the masses to which Yeats was opposed. However, it was also within radio’s capabilities to control modes of broadcasting, influencing the public and regenerating Irish culture through the dissemination of poetry.
关于叶芝20世纪30年代后期的右翼政治和对优生学的同情,尤其是对《锅炉》的同情,已经写了很多。叶芝关注爱尔兰的退化,并呼吁通过文化(甚至是生物方法)来实现爱尔兰的复兴,与此同时,他与爱尔兰蓝衫军(Irish bluesshirts)的勾搭,以及他对Éamon de Valera领导下的爱尔兰自由邦(Irish Free State)的转型感到沮丧。然而,这几年也是叶芝在广播方面最活跃的时期,他的九次广播中有六次是在1937年到1938年之间进行的。在这篇文章中,我读了叶芝的广播,特别是《在诗人的酒吧里》、《在诗人的客厅里》和《我自己的诗》,以及《锅炉上》,以展示退化和再生的主题如何将这些作品联系起来。作为一种媒介,广播可以促进叶芝所反对的文化堕落和迎合大众。然而,广播电台也有能力控制广播模式,通过传播诗歌影响公众并使爱尔兰文化再生。
{"title":"Politics, Eugenics, and Yeats's Radio Broadcasts","authors":"Melissa Dinsman","doi":"10.34068/IYS.03.01.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/IYS.03.01.05","url":null,"abstract":"Much has been written about the right-wing politics and eugenicist sympathies of Yeats’s late-1930s poetry in general and about On the Boiler in particular. Yeats’s focus on Ireland’s degeneration and his calls for its regeneration through cultural (and even biological methods) coincided with his dalliance with the Irish Blueshirts and his frustrations with the transformations of the Irish Free State under Éamon de Valera. However, these years also proved to be Yeats’s most active in terms of radio broadcasting, with six of his nine broadcasts made between 1937 and 1938. In this essay, I read Yeats’s broadcasts, in particular “In the Poet’s Pub,” “In the Poet’s Parlour,” and “My Own Poetry” alongside On the Boiler to show how themes of degeneration and regeneration link these works. As a medium, radio could advance the cultural degeneration and pandering to the masses to which Yeats was opposed. However, it was also within radio’s capabilities to control modes of broadcasting, influencing the public and regenerating Irish culture through the dissemination of poetry.","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134565101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Review of Thomas MacGreevy and the Rise of the Irish Avant-Garde, by Francis Hutton-Williams","authors":"Benjamin Keatinge","doi":"10.34068/iys.6.1.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/iys.6.1.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124670314","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Spirits on Stage Rosicrucian Magic in The Countless Children","authors":"Sørina Higgins","doi":"10.34068/iys.6.1.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/iys.6.1.3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"15 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125990679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making the Impossible Possible, A Review of Dance and Modernism in Irish and German Literature and Culture: Connections in Motion","authors":"Melinda Szűts","doi":"10.34068/iys.6.1.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/iys.6.1.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131006111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats Volume V: 1908-1910, edited by John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard","authors":"Maria Rita Drumond Viana","doi":"10.34068/iys.05.01.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.34068/iys.05.01.08","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":340177,"journal":{"name":"International Yeats Studies","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122554758","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}