"On being asked for a War Poem ""On being asked for a War Poem"" is a poem by William Butler Yeats written on February 6, 1915 in response to a request by Henry James that Yeats compose a political poem about World War I. Yeats changed the poem's title from ""To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations"" to ""A Reason for Keeping Silent"" before sending it in a letter to James, which Yeats wrote at Coole Park on August 20, 1915. The poem was prefaced with a note stating: ""It is the"
"the sounds of birds' wings, and, of course, the bees. He can even build a cabin and stay on the island much as Thoreau, the American Transcendentalist, lived in this manner on Walden Pond. During Yeats's lifetime it was—to his annoyance—one of his most popular poems and on one occasion was recited (or sung) in his honor by two (or ten—accounts vary) thousand boy scouts. The first quatrain speaks to the needs of the body (food & shelter); the second to the needs of the spirit (peace); the final quatrain is the meeting of the inner life (memory) with the"
"poet, and the poet is Jack'. He was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916. He died in Dublin in 1957, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery. Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland's first medalist at the Olympic Games in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, Yeats' painting ""The Liffey Swim"" won a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled ""Swimming"". In November 2010, one of Yeats's works, ""A Horseman Enters a"
"get within a hundred miles of Leicester Square."" Lake Isle of Innisfree ""The Lake Isle of Innisfree"" is a twelve-line poem composed of three quatrains written by William Butler Yeats in 1888 and first published in the ""National Observer"" in 1890. It was reprinted in ""The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics"" in 1892 and as an illustrated Cuala Press Broadside in 1932. ""The Lake Isle of Innisfree"" exemplifies the style of the Celtic Revival: it is an attempt to create a form of poetry that was Irish in origin rather than one that adhered to the standards set"
"The Circus Animals' Desertion ""The Circus Animals' Desertion"" is a poem by William Butler Yeats published in ""Last Poems"" in 1939. While the original composition date of the poem is unknown, it was probably written between November 1937 and September 1938. In the preface, Yeats suggests that he intended the poem to combine his personal views and impressions with the customs and beliefs of Christian Ireland. The poem was the last work published in Yeats's final collection, with ""Politics"" following as an envoi. In the poem, the poet uses the desertion of circus animals as an analogy to describe his"
"with critics influenced by modernism, who dislike its pre-Raphaelite character. However, Harold Bloom defended this poem in his book-length study of Yeats, and concludes that it deserves reconsideration. The fairy princess Niamh fell in love with Oisin's poetry and begged him to join her in the immortal islands. For a hundred years he lived as one of the Sidhe, hunting, dancing, and feasting. At the end of this time he found a spear washed up on the shore and grew sad, remembering his times with the Fenians. Niamh took him away to another island, where the ancient and abandoned castle"
"(1902), and ""Gods and Fighting Men"" (1904). In the preface of the later he wrote: ""One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many incidents, woven into one great event of, let us say the War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering at Muirthemne."" Yeats was an Irish Nationalist, who sought a kind of traditional lifestyle articulated through poems such as 'The Fisherman'. However, as his life progressed, he sheltered much of his revolutionary spirit and distanced himself from the intense political landscape until 1922, when he was appointed Senator for"
"acclaim in the United Kingdom and France. The Isle of Innisfree is an uninhabited island within Lough Gill, in County Sligo, Ireland, where Yeats spent his summers as a child. Yeats describes the inspiration for the poem coming from a ""sudden"" memory of his childhood while walking down Fleet Street in London in 1888. He writes, ""I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain"
"highly retrospective. The Circus Animals' Desertion ""The Circus Animals' Desertion"" is a poem by William Butler Yeats published in ""Last Poems"" in 1939. While the original composition date of the poem is unknown, it was probably written between November 1937 and September 1938. In the preface, Yeats suggests that he intended the poem to combine his personal views and impressions with the customs and beliefs of Christian Ireland. The poem was the last work published in Yeats's final collection, with ""Politics"" following as an envoi. In the poem, the poet uses the desertion of circus animals as an analogy to"
"Ode to a Nightingale ""Ode to a Nightingale"" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house Keats and Brown shared in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in ""Annals of the Fine Arts"""
"the family moved to Bedford Park, Chiswick, in 1878. Yeats returned to Howth, Co. Dublin in 1881. She enrolled, with her sister Susan, in the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1883 and took classes at the Royal Dublin Society. The family moved to Eardley Crescent, South Kensington, London, in 1886. While there Yeats started to write fiction and published a home-made magazine, The Pleiades, with six friends, contributing ‘Story without a plot’ to the Christmas 1888 issue. In addition, she published ‘Scamp and three friends’ in The Vegetarian. In the 1890s she lived at 3 Blenheim Road, Bedford Park,"
"""Tragic Generation"" in his autobiography, and published two anthologies of the Rhymers' work, the first one in 1892 and the second one in 1894. He collaborated with Edwin Ellis on the first complete edition of William Blake's works, in the process rediscovering a forgotten poem, ""Vala, or, the Four Zoas"". Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology. He read extensively on the subjects throughout his life, became a member of the paranormal research organisation ""The Ghost Club"" (in 1911) and was especially influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. As early as 1892, he wrote: ""If"
"to create what Glenn Willmott calls a ""narcissistic paradise"". According to Willmott, Yeats's poems often move from the world of social interaction to a place where the individual finds seclusion, as is also the case in the pastoral Yeats's earlier poems ""The Lake Isle of Innisfree, ""The Song of the Happy Shepherd"", and ""The Sad Shepherd"". All of the poems create a ""utopia"" in which the poet finds relief from public life by withdrawing from social spheres and entering into a mythical setting, yet ""Politics"" is unique in that it lacks the pastoral qualities of the earlier works and finds"
"Out"", Tommy recites the poem just before he gets hit by the train. John Ford's Academy Award winning film ""The Quiet Man"" (1952) is set in Innisfree and clearly takes Yeat's poem as one of its principal subtexts. Hard rock band Sir Lord Baltimore has a song called ""Lake Isle of Innersfree,"" presumably inspired by Yeats' poem. It appears on their 1970 LP Kingdom Come. In the song ""The Shrine/An Argument"" by Seattle indie folk band ""Fleet Foxes"" Innisfree is mentioned in the song's final lyric: ""Carry me to Innisfree like pollen on the breeze."" The band also mentions Innisfree"
"than in any other subject. Very poor in spelling"". Though he had difficulty with mathematics and languages (possibly because he was tone deaf), he was fascinated by biology and zoology. In 1879 the family moved to Bedford Park taking a two-year lease on 8 Woodstock Road. For financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin toward the end of 1880, living at first in the suburbs of Harold's Cross and later Howth. In October 1881, Yeats resumed his education at Dublin's Erasmus Smith High School. His father's studio was nearby and William spent a great deal of time there, where he"
"writings of William Blake. In later life, Yeats paid tribute to Blake by describing him as one of the ""great artificers of God who uttered great truths to a little clan"". In 1891, Yeats published ""John Sherman"" and ""Dhoya"", one a novella, the other a story. The family returned to London in 1887. In March 1890 Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and with Ernest Rhys co-founded the Rhymers' Club, a group of London-based poets who met regularly in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their verse. Yeats later sought to mythologize the collective, calling it the"
"sequence to become part of the play, ""At the Hawk’s Well"". This work also included some poems from the ""Green Helmet and Other Poems"" (1910) and the 1913 poems from ""Poems Written in Discouragement."" Beginning in 1895 with ""Poems"" and in 1899 with ""The Wind among the Reeds"" Yeats published poems typically with a dreamlike atmosphere and replete with reference to Irish folklore and legends. ""The Green Helmet"" of 1910 contained little of the Celtic influence of his earlier poems. The other world had all but disappeared with his publication of ""Responsibilities and a Play"". The ""Responsibilities"" poems signify a"
"He submitted his own poems, as well as poems by James Joyce, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, Yeats, H.D. and Aldington, and collected material for a 64-page anthology, ""Des Imagistes"" (1914). The Imagist movement began to attract attention from critics. In November 1913 Yeats, whose eyesight was failing, rented Stone Cottage in Coleman's Hatch, Sussex, and invited Pound to accompany him as his secretary. They stayed there for 10 weeks, reading and writing, walking in the woods and fencing. It was the first of three winters they spent together at Stone Cottage, including two with Dorothy after she and Pound"
"Beckett derived his title, Yeats puts the real world in perspective, thereby reducing his own sense of loss."" In a personal communication Beckett told Eoin O'Brien that this was one of Yeats's greatest lines. But why this particular line from the poem? Is it to do with the nature of clouds? ""Clouds seem permanent but are ultimately impermanent; they cannot be touched, yet can be seen; they are nothing more than condensed water, yet remain a symbol of romance, of the imagination beyond practical measurement – they are, in a phrase, at once here and elsewhere."" The director, Sidney Homan,"
"thus becomes ""the characteristic note of Yeats's great mature poetry."" Hugh Lane offered his collection of paintings to the Dublin Municipal Corporation. Public reaction was mostly negative on economic and moral grounds. In the end, as Yeats said ""the mob"" prevailed. In a note to this poem Yeats wrote that the pictures ""works by Corot, Degas and Renoir - were compared to the Trojan Horse 'which destroyed a city'. They were dubbed 'indecent' and those who admired the painting were called 'self-seekers, self-advertisers, picture dealers, log-rolling cranks, and faddists'..."" Yeats wrote this poem following the Dublin Lock-out and the Hugh"
"integral to the poet's work. The mountain is one of the destinations on the Passport Trail of the poet's life. Yeats wrote the following in ""The Celtic Twilight"": The mountain is also mentioned in Yeats's ""On a Political Prisoner"", in which he recalls the Countess Markiewicz riding past it to political meetings. Yeats's famous poem, ""Under Ben Bulben"", is essentially a description of Yeats Country. It describes the sights that he saw in Yeats Country. The following is an excerpt from ""Under Ben Bulben"": This was Yeats's final poem, published in ""The Irish Times"". He is buried in Drumcliffe Churchyard,"
"It relocated to its present campus on Lexington Road in 1926. In February 1882, Oscar Wilde lectured in the city and on that occasion met Emma Speed Keats, the niece of his poetical hero (John Keats), who had settled in the city. She was the daughter of Keats' brother George Keats and she later sent Wilde an autograph manuscript by Keats of his poem 'Sonnet on Blue'. On August 1, 1883, U.S. President Chester A. Arthur opened the first annual Southern Exposition, a series of World's Fairs that would run for five consecutive years adjacent to Central Park in what"
"such as ""The Rose for the World"", ""Adam's Curse"", ""No Second Troy"", ""All Things can Tempt me"", and ""Meditations in Time of Civil War"". Some poems depict desire as a poison for the soul; Yeats worked through his desire for his beloved, Maud Gonne, and realized that ""Our longing, our craving, our thirsting for something other than Reality is what dissatisfies us"". In ""The Rose for the World"", he admires her beauty, but feels pain because he cannot be with her. In the poem ""No Second Troy"", Yeats overflows with anger and bitterness because of their unrequited love. Poet T."
"with his family until 1928. The book includes several of Yeats' most famous poems, including ""Sailing to Byzantium,"" ""Leda and the Swan,"" and ""Among School Children."" All of the poems included in ""The Tower"" had previously appeared elsewhere in print collections and periodicals. Many of the poems featured in ""Seven Poems and a Fragment"", ""The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems"", and ""October Blast"" released by Cuala Press. Other poems had been collected in ""A Vision"". Yeats commissioned Thomas Sturge Moore to create the cover for the volume in 1927. The gold wood-cut style image depicts Thoor Ballylee and"
"met many of the city's artists and writers. During this period he started writing poetry, and, in 1885, the ""Dublin University Review"" published Yeats's first poems, as well as an essay entitled ""The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson"". Between 1884 and 1886, William attended the Metropolitan School of Art—now the National College of Art and Design—in Thomas Street. In March 1888 the family moved to 3 Blenheim Road in Bedford Park. The rent on the house was £50 a year. He began writing his first works when he was seventeen; these included a poem—heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley—that describes"
"Brandon with all WB[Yeats]'s magic about me – no credit to me of course because I was possessed by Kerry's self"". He wrote in a programme note for the work that he had sought ""to suggest the revelries of the 'Hidden People' in the inmost deeps and hollow hills of Ireland"". The literary basis for the piece is Yeats's collection ""The Wanderings of Oisin"". The fairy princess Niam falls in love with the Irish hero, Oisin and his poetry, and persuades him to join her in the immortal islands. He sings to the immortals what he conceives to be a"
"Down by the Salley Gardens ""Down by the Salley Gardens"" (""Irish: Gort na Saileán"") is a poem by William Butler Yeats published in ""The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems"" in 1889. Yeats indicated in a note that it was ""an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballisodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself."" The ""old song"" may have been the ballad ""The Rambling Boys of Pleasure"" which contains the following verse: The similarity to the first verse of the Yeats version is unmistakable and"
"Yeats was inspired and compelled to create literary works at Ballylee such as poems like ""The Tower"" and ""Coole Park and Ballylee"". In 1929, Ballylee was abandoned as the Yeats family moved out and it fell to disuse and ruin. In 1951, a scene of John Ford's The Quiet Man in which John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara cross a river was shot next to Thoor Ballylee. Mary Hanley (1914-1979) was the founder of the Kiltartan Society. A native of Carron, County Clare, Hanley founded the society in 1961 to foster interest in the literary history of the district, especially that"
"cottage attached. Yeats described the ground-floor chamber as ""the pleasantest room I have yet seen, a great wide window opening over the river and a round arched door leading to the thatched hall"". He also admired the mural stair, symbolically declaring ""This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair; That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have traveled there."" There is a tablet on the wall that commemorates Yeats' sojourn: ""I, the poet William Yeats,"" ""With old mill boards and sea-green slates,"" ""And smithy work from the Gort forge,"" ""Restored this tower for my wife"
"""Blood and the Moon"" was published, as well as the ""gyre"" which had been a major focus of his 1920 poem ""The Second Coming"". The murder of Kevin O'Higgins acted as a catalyst for Yeats's creation of the poem. As Vice President and Minister of Home Affairs in the Cosgrave Government, O'Higgins had enforced the Army Emergency Powers Act and condemned seventy-seven Republican ""irregulars"", including author Erskine Childers and many men with whom O'Higgins had been allies during the Irish War of Independence. O'Higgins was assassinated by a Republican gunman on 10 July 1927. When Yeats heard the news that"
"over 70 titles; 48 of them books by Yeats himself. Yeats met the American poet Ezra Pound in 1909. Pound had travelled to London at least partly to meet the older man, whom he considered ""the only poet worthy of serious study."" From that year until 1916, the two men wintered in the Stone Cottage at Ashdown Forest, with Pound nominally acting as Yeats's secretary. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for the publication in the magazine ""Poetry"" of some of Yeats's verse with Pound's own unauthorised alterations. These changes reflected Pound's distaste for Victorian"
"the Waterboys album 'An Appointment with Mr Yeats', a collection of Yeats poems set to music by Mike Scott. In the movie ""Memphis Belle"", the character Sgt. Danny Daly, a crewman on a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress recites the poem, omitting the lines referring to Ireland.. In the movie ""Congo"", Dr. Peter Elliot says that his reason for teaching the ape to talk is """"a lonely impulse of delight."""" The final four lines are quoted in the first episode of the second series of the BBC Three zombie drama ""In the Flesh"" by the character Simon Monroe, who is played"
"Keeping Silent"" before sending it in a letter to James, which Yeats wrote at Coole Park on August 20, 1915. When it was later reprinted the title was changed to ""On being asked for a War Poem"". Yeats' most famous war poem is ""An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"". the poem is a soliloquy given by an aviator in the First World War in which the narrator describes the circumstances surrounding his imminent death. The poem is a work that discusses the role of Irish soldiers fighting for the United Kingdom during a time when the Irish were trying to"