W. B. Yeats and the BBC: a Reassessment

Abstract

In the later years of his life, between 1931 and 1937, W. B. Yeats was directly involved in the broadcast of eight BBC programmes about his work. These were Yeats’s talk on his version of Oedipus the King, a performance of which was broadcast from the Belfast Studio by the Abbey Players (8 September 1931),¹ the reading of his poems in An Irish Programme (8 September 1931), the St Patrick’s Night broadcast of 1934, the Lecture on Modern Poetry broadcast after the publication of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (11 October 1936), In The Poet’s Pub (2 April 1937), In The Poet’s Parlour (22 April 1937), and the two programmes of Yeats’s own readings (3 July and 29 October 1937).