Volume 55, Number 5 · April 3, 2008
How Yeats Did It
By Mark Ford
Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form
by Helen Vendler
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 428 pp., $35.00
In a recording of his poetry made for the BBC in 1932, William Butler Yeats prefaced his stirring rendition of pieces such as 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' and 'The Fiddler of Dooney' by explaining that he would read 'with great emphasis upon the rhythm, and that may seem strange if you are not used to it.' 'It gave me,' he continues, 'a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.' There is indeed nothing prosaic in his incantatory method of delivery—'I will ariiiiiise and gooooo noooow, and gooo to Innisfrreee...'—and it takes him a full five seconds to do justice to the long vowels of the poem's final line, 'I heeeeaar it in the deeeep heeaart's coooore.'
Review, 4398 words
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