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To: Neocon who wrote (1480)	11/12/1999 12:44:00 PM
From: Edwarda	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

Here's a quote from Seamus Heaney that you might find interesting. Seamus Heaney is a former Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot set the mode of eulogy immediately, Auden accepting (metrically as well as in other ways) Yeats's deathbed version of himself as poetic oracle and ancestor, carrying on the beat of "Under Ben Bulben" ("Follow, poet, follow right/To the bottom of the night"), and trying on the role. Eliot, on the other hand, in his memorial lecture at the Abbey Theatre in 1940, commemorated Yeats not as a Delphic voice but as an exemplary practitioner, one whose history was the history of his times, and thereby transferred to the dead archbard the kind of justifying claim that was then being made for his own peculiarly modern genius. The terms of Eliot's praise have often been cited and its justice recognized, but it is only with the publication of Roy Foster's life that the intensity and intimacy of Yeats's engagement with the life of his times can be fully appreciated.

To: Neocon who wrote (1480)	11/12/1999 2:29:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

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