W. B. Yeats’s “Poems about Women: a Broadcast”

Abstract

It is apparent from even the opening words of this broadcast (given on 9.05–9.30 p.m., 10 April 1932, BBC London, National Programme) that Yeats found it easy neither to choose poems nor to gloss them for the vast and unknown audience provided for him by radio. He had consulted his “great friend” Olivia Shakespear (1863–1938), his first lover, about the broadcast, asking her

if you can think of any poems of mine that would do for broadcasting tell me. I cannot use again the Belfast poems.¹ I cannot think of more than perhaps two groups — six poems each. I wish I could think of anything else besides poems. (L 786) 786)

Eventually he read no poems about Olivia Shakespear, although he had considered reading “Memory”. Lady Gregory was dying at Coole, and he read no poems about her either, although the presence of death is strongly felt in the choice of poems. Constrained, too, by the pattern of audience expectations he had built up over many years with the shape-changing but relatively constant canon of the T. Fisher Unwin Poems (1895–1927), he knew he had to read on each occasion at least a couple of well-loved early lyrics. The holograph of the broadcast notes contains certain tentative lists of identifiable poems, in some cases linked by Yeats with specific women and with estimates of how long (in minutes) each would take to read.