You mean you think "IMO" and "possibly" are "unctuous
phrases"? (!!)
If so, I am generally "unctuous." I was deliberately
"non-unctuous" in my last message to you, to give you a
taste of what it sounds like.
You write:
I have made it clear that there is plenty of room for
disagreement, and I have occasionally changed my mind on something.
Are you running a seminar, or something? If so, I'm
dropping out. I already have a PhD. <g>
Now, as to poets influenced by Yeats (I am thinking more of- poetic
technique than of subject matter): I would not say that Dylan
Thomas (oops, sorry for the unction) owed a great deal to
Yeats; his own style is too original, too derived from Welsh
speech patterns, etc. But W. H. Auden, for example, owed Yeats a lot. Are you familiar with his elegy for Yeats? What could be more Yeatsian than lines like the following:
Earth, receive an honored guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel be
Emptied of its poetry.
....................................
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
The run-on (but rhymed) sentence line is pure Yeats. So is the use of couplets.
Off the top of my head, some of the myriad other poets that were/have been heavily influenced by Yeats: C. Day Lewis, Phillip Levine, Philip Larkin (who tried hard to free himself from Yeats' influence, once writing, as I recall, that Yeats' style was "as pervasive as garlic," and that imitating it had "ruined many a lesser talent"); virtually every Irish poet up to and including Seamus Heaney...And then, of the prose writers, there is Samuel Beckett..
Hey, what about Beckett for the list? Waiting for Godot as
THE existentialist manifesto of the 20th century?
Joan
|
