Abstract
The phrase borrowed for the title you see above,1 appears in ‘Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation’ (VP 264). In this poem, written in 1910, Yeats laments the threat posed to Lady Gregory’s estate by a judicial reduction in the rents paid by her tenants. The physical ruin of the big house is contemplated and beyond and above that, its aristocratic traditions and style of which the culmination is, in Yeats’s oxymoronic figure, ‘a written speech’. This is said to be ‘gradual Time’s last gift …/Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease’, and it is made, he says, only to those who are already endowed with the ‘gifts that govern men’.
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Notes
A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1984) pp. 92–4.
Lady Gregory Augusta, Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory, edited and with a foreword by Colin Smythe (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1973) p. 392.
John Montague, ed., The Faber Book of Irish Verse (London: Faber & Faber, 1974) p. 345.
John Montague, A Fair House (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1972) p. iii.
Michael Hartnett, Poems in English (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1977) p. 58.
Dawe, Gerald, ed., The New Younger Irish Poets (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1991) p. 52.
Seamus Deane et al., eds, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, III (Lawrence Hill, Deny: Field Day Press, 1991) p. 1313.
Brian Friel, Selected Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1984) p. 418.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) I, p. 51
Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, eds, Yeats and the Theatre (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1975) p. 74.
Maud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938) p. 328.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1971) p. 16.
Ronald Schuchard, ‘The Minstrel in the Theatre: Arnold, Chaucer and Yeats’s New Spiritual Democracy’, YA 2 (1983): 3–24.
Warwick Gould, ‘An Empty Theatre? Yeats as Minstrel in Responsibilities’, Studies on W. B. Yeats, ed. Jaqueline Genet (Caen: Groupe de Recherches d’Études anglo-irlandaises du C.N.R.S., 1989) pp. 79–118.
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and revised edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) p. 154.
Yvor Winters, ‘The Audible Reading of Poetry’, Twentieth Century Poetry: critical essays and documents, ed. Graham Martin and P. N. Furbank (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1975) p. 126.
Paul Valéry, ‘De la diction des vers’, Oeuvres II, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) p. 1255.
The product of all these factors is an amazing number of possible decisions and misunderstandings — not to mention differences of interpretation.’ (‘On Speaking Verse’, The Art of Poetry, translated by Denise Folliot [New York: Vintage Books, 1961] p. 161.)
Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature (London: Macmillan, 1989) p. 36.
See especially Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967) pp. 375–445.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Yeats’, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957) p. 258.
John Drakakis, ed., British Radio Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) p. 31.
John Montague, ed., The Faber Book of Irish Verse (London: Faber & Faber, 1974) p. 21.
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© 1996 Michael J. Sidnell
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Sidnell, M.J. (1996). ‘Written Speech’: Writing, Hearing and Performance. In: Yeats’s Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24988-6_2
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