William Butler Yeats

mcmarsh when i put this to him many moons ago said donald this is a hotel glass never nobody checks out so he's not going anywhere but i mean roger casement was buried in a quick quick climb grave yeah like that's why the

remains were so hard to identify when they're bringing up with the quick lime the decomposition It's a bit like WB Yeats, where he's buried.

Is it Yeats or is it not Yeats? Or is it part of Yeats and other people from an ossuary, a bone house over it? It's hard to tell, and the only way you'll ever find out is going down to check, and whether the tourism board there wants to ruin the story is another question.

Now for Casement, He is one of our claim to fames in Glasnevin, like the only one of 16 leaders executed in 1916.

Because I don't even know, it's like, I have a couple of friends that are part Palestinian maybe.

There are now like a bunch of Palestinian poets and writers that are getting translated into English that are just like incredibly gifted, thoughtful, insightful people.

And it makes me that much sadder that, you know, they don't have a leadership that they deserve.

And like that's what I wish for very much.

The heroes are becoming watered down across time.

And when I think of Vico, I can't help but also think of the Yeats poem, Three Movements, which goes like this.

So you've got theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and then what's the fourth age? Well, you've got the chaotic age, a period of chaos, which Vico didn't actually go much into, but...

This is the age where we finally get our recorso, or return.

The proxy may sometimes... take the initiative in its own hands.

You know, as in the famous Yeats poem, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

So it may do whatever it wants.

And so I just want to say that there may be moments where the two partners, namely the United States and Israel, act with certain degree of autonomy from one another.

sort

of putting the same size of a magnet together, which is something that Yeats does in his political poetry as well, where you have this sense of destruction almost, like on the kind of level of the image, I guess.

And that's something I find interesting about her, I suppose, is...

She's really interested in having images and poetic structures kind of breaking apart.

But yeah, it feels like there is a strange, because the readings of her rely so much on her biography, and her, obviously, like the tremendous force of her personality.

It's clear from all the people, like we haven't even mentioned Kay Boyle or some of the people she knew.

really well who wrote about her in some detail she obviously just had this volcanic personality and was like yeah just very very charismatic in a kind of monastic aesthetic way and maybe that force then yeah is not quite present in the same way like I almost I'm tempted to say that her poetry doesn't achieve the same formal accomplishment as her life you know yeah and it is an interesting thing you mentioned Yeats and I was thinking about that I was thinking about an old philosophical essay by R.B. Braithwaite.

He was this like minor mid-century Scottish philosopher, but he asked this question about Is there a dubious assumption here that the culture of the inner life is the one supremely valuable thing? And this was kind of in these like Neoplatonic philosophical circles.

His youthful idealism, his doomed relationship with Sarah Curran, the brilliance of the speech from the dock, and the very fact that so little was known about him all contributed to his deification.

WB Yeats later described him as the leading saint of Irish nationality.

Maxwell, writing in History of Ireland, argues that Emmett was seen at times as having a death wish, but Maxwell disputes this, or that Emmett wished to be a martyr.

He argues Emmett wished to live, but however, in the face of his own death, he was very cognizant of his legacy and his influence on the future of Ireland.

And I think that's actually a stronger argument for this than the class argument, because obviously Stoker coming from Ireland, growing up within that, and somebody who believed in home rule for Ireland as well.

But he was an Irish Protestant, but also fascinated with the occult and folklore in the same way that WB Yeats.

or Sheridan Le Fanu.

It's kind of a thing that was happening at that time.