...At the end of his life, Yeats wasn’t sure he’d been wise to spend so much time thinking about the theater. In his late poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” he wrote: “Players and painted stage took all my love,/And not those things that they were emblems of.” He wishes to return, famously, to poetry, to “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
Wish I could be there for the stagings...is it tragic that he was caught somewhere between verse and drama? What would he have been if he overcame his ambition to write drama, or suppressed his instinct to poetry? I think it would be a fascinating study. Although, I'm sure some biographer or another has already taken this on...maybe.
I think it's a fine idea for the kind of ruminative essay we don't see enough of. One would have to really ponder both the poetry and the plays - and see at least some of the latter, if possible. Maybe you should think about doing it yourself.
...At the end of his life, Yeats wasn’t sure he’d been wise to spend so much time thinking about the theater. In his late poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” he wrote: “Players and painted stage took all my love,/And not those things that they were emblems of.” He wishes to return, famously, to poetry, to “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
ReplyDeleteWish I could be there for the stagings...is it tragic that he was caught somewhere between verse and drama? What would he have been if he overcame his ambition to write drama, or suppressed his instinct to poetry? I think it would be a fascinating study. Although, I'm sure some biographer or another has already taken this on...maybe.
I think it's a fine idea for the kind of ruminative essay we don't see enough of. One would have to really ponder both the poetry and the plays - and see at least some of the latter, if possible. Maybe you should think about doing it yourself.
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