Heaney and Muldoon

The Poetry@Harvard site, now live.

Horace, Odes I:34 (the basis for Heaney's "Anything Can Happen") in Latin and in an 1882 English translation.

A map of Northern Ireland.

Heaney's 1995 Nobel Lecture.

Heaney at the London-based Poetry Archive, with audio.

Heaney reading "The Tollund Man," with audio and an image, from PBS.

From the Lannan Foundation, a long interview between Heaney and Dennis O'Driscoll, with Heaney reading his own work.

Photographs of the bog corpses described in P. V. Glob's book.

A mural in Derry remembering Bloody Sunday.

Muldoon's 1980 poem "Cuba."

Muldoon's own site. Muldoon's rock band, Wayside Shrines.

Audio that works: Muldoon reads his own poems. Muldoon reads "Meeting the British."

Muldoon at the Poetry Foundation, with a couple of poems.

All the books by Paul Muldoon (with photo).

A few of Heaney's poems at the Poetry Foundation, including the whole sequence "Glanmore Sonnets."

All the books by Heaney, with recent photo.

Helen Vendler's eulogy for Heaney.

Caryl Churchill

Churchill's new and controversial short play Seven Jewish Children: the full text. The controversy, and an online video of a reading.

Reviews for Far Away from the Guardian, from the Village Voice, and the New York Times. Program notes from the Royal Court Theatre in London.

Also from the Guardian, a photo essay celebrating Churchill's 70th birthday in 2008.

Stills from productions: at Austin Community College (act II); at Philadelphia's Flashpoint Theatre; at Dartmouth College (act I); in Australia, from the Black Swan Theatre Company in Perth (follow internal link for a slideshow).

A series of stills from the production at the Univ. of Iowa. Hat specialists work on a production in Seattle.

Atul Gawande in the New Yorker on solitary confinement and torture.

Act III: the eye of an enemy. An enemy. Another enemy. A very dangerous enemy.

A few poets: Auden and afterwards

Visual early Auden: a Pennine valley, and a worked-out mine.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558?).

Auden's "Lullaby" (from the Academy of American Poets).

More of Auden's poems (from the Academy, with some audio). Auden reading his poems in New York City in 1972, from the New York Times. The Auden society.

The Philip Larkin society (weird-looking site design alludes to Larkin's poem "Toads"; some links don't work). Unglamorous Hull city centre, today; a road by Pearson Park, where Larkin lived, and a tiny image of Larkin's own flat. And Byrnmor Jones Library, Univ. of Hull.

Larkin's "High Windows. More Larkin poems in reliable versions online, from the Poetry Foundation.

Also from the Foundation, Geoffrey Hill; some segments from Mercian Hymns.

The Kings of Mercia.

Yeats and Woolf

From the Academy of American Poets, a reliable text for Sailing to Byzantium."

From the Academy, "A Prayer for My Daughter."

Byzantine art in Ravenna: mosaic of Justinian; a detail with a head; a Byzantine church interior from Ravenna.

The Stone Cottage where Yeats lived with Pound as his assistant for parts of 1913-16.

Art in Bloomsbury: Vanessa Bell by Duncan Grant (1915). Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell (1912).

Yeats: some drafts

Click this link, then scroll down and click again, to enlarge a manuscript page from the drafts of "Sailing to Byzantium."

Some drafts for stanza 2 (with hints that ended up elsewhere in the poem, esp. stanza 8) of "A Prayer for My Daughter" (1919), starting with the earliest surviving fragment of the poem:

God grant my prayer

Nor am I the first father that has stood
here

And judged the here beside this cradle hood
seeing thinking that
And seeing that a popular tempest blew
all

As though to make things a knew new

According to opinion driven men wild
Decides that some ( )

As this opinion wound, had driven men wild
And filled their hearts with bitterness

Feared for this child unless
For Had fear

Had dread for this child's peace unless
Heaven pour abounding sweetness on the child

******

And it may [be] another father stood

And gazed upon a head below this that hood

And thinking what a popular tempest blew

That all things

And thinks if all men's minds anew

And That all must be with opinion driven wild

And full of dusty bitterness

Shudder for that child's peace unless

****

It may be that soon
Considering that this cradle old may be

Some other father has had like had like reverie

When the wind rose, I thought ( ) bless

Until all things were made anew

All must be with opinion driven wild

And choked with full of dusty bitterness

Trembling | And shuddered for his child's play peace unless

Heaven pour abounding sweetness on his child.

***

Nor am I | I am not the first father that has
Many another father may have stood
Where And weighed ( )
As I stand now beside this cradle-hood

Time | And judged by the blast beside

And as all times have trouble, this own

Thought the storm beaten the world fell stone upon stone

and that the masters of the world ran
The world fell while its masters had gone wild

And racked his brain to think of all

That might that sleeping child befall
And what were the best prayer to pray for the
And prayed as I some charmed gift for his child

And what to ask of heaven for the child

And what prayer might be best

(Quoted in Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats' Poetry in the Making, Oxford: Clarendon, 1963, pp29-33)

Yeats: a letter about Easter 1916

Yeats to Lady Gregory, May 11, 1916: "The Dublin tragedy has been a great sorrow and anxiety... I see that an old friend-- unless there are two of the name-- who began with me the whole work of the literary movement has been shot in a barrack yard without trial of any kind....

"I am trying to write a poem on the men executed-- 'terrible beauty has been born again.' If the English Conservative party had made a declaration that they did not intend to rescind the Irish Home Rule bill there would have been no Rebellion. I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me-- and I am very despondent about the future. At the moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature and criticism from politics.

"Maud Gonne reminds me that she saw the ruined houses about O'Connell Street and the wounded and dying lying about in the streets, in the first few days of the war. I perfectly remember the vision and my making light of it and saying that if a true vision at all it could only have a symbolised meaning.

"This is the only letter I have had from her since she knew of the Rebellion. I have sent her the papers every day. I do not yet know what she feels about her husband's death. Her letter was written before she heard of it. Her main thought seems to be' tragic dignity has returned to Ireland.'" (Quoted in A. N. Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, London: Macmillan, 1968, pp225-26)

Yeats

Under Ben Bulben in present-day Sligo. The same scene, seen from the sea.

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree," an early "hit."

An accurate (but ugly) text for "Who Goes with Fergus?"

The final (1925) version of "The Sorrow of Love."

The original Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

"The Fascination of What's Difficult."

18th-century Dublin houses. The Easter Rising proclamation; an Irish memorial to the dead of the Easter Rising, with Yeats' lines from "Easter 1916" inscribed. The Dublin General Post Office after the Easter Rising.

"Easter 1916."

Another reliable text for "Easter 1916," with links to contemporary American poets reading parts of that poem.

Yeats's Tower. Another view. John Rickard's photographs of Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee, where Yeats spent part of each year from 1918 to the late 1920s. The restored Coole Park, with deer, in a recent photograph.

A map of troop deployments from the Irish Civil War.

Most links to poems here come from the Yeats page at the Poetry Foundation, likely the only online source for reliable texts to many of these poems; Yeats' later poems are still under copyright, though these are in the public domain in the United States.

Ezra Pound's review of Yeats's Responsibilities (1914).

Some audio files: "It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get them into verse"; the Lake Isle. (More audio files on Monday from CD.)

On the first appearance of "Who Goes with Fergus?" (as quoted by M. L. Rosenthal).

Some diagrams and excerpts from Yeats' A Vision. Neil Mann's elaborate explication of A Vision, with more diagrams.