“a curlew cried and in the luminous wind/ A curlew answered” – “Paudeen”, WB Yeats
World Curlew Day has been and gone, but the literature of curlews seems endless. I am reading “Curlew Moon” by Mary Colwell which has been an engrossing read so far…
Tag: w b yeats
“The Curlew”, song cycle by Peter Warlock of Yeats poems.
One of the more colourful, if not notorious, characters of British music was Peter Warlock. Like Arnold Bax he gained much inspiration from a sojourn in Ireland “The Curlew” song…
Against the inspirational
A while back I posted about what I called the Inspirational Imperative; the pressure to craft suffering and distress and setbacks into more-easily-digestible, feelgood stories of “inspiration.” The need to…
“The Best Lack All Conviction, while the Worst / Are Full Of Passionate Intensity”
According to this article from August 2016, lines from Yeats’ The Second Coming were quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than in any of the prior…
Yeats on Kipling: “I dislike his works so much that I feel sure it must have something to teach me”
(edit 30th August 2018 – for more on the uneasy relationship between another poet and Yeats, see here. For a TLS letter which also features Kipling (in a perhaps less than…
Séamus Sweeney 