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Adrian Paterson, Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts., Notes and Queries, Volume 56, Issue 4, December 2009, Pages 665–666, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjp222
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Extract
IN the second of the justly famous general introductions to his work W. B.Yeats declared ‘I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for ear alone.’ This resonant phrasing has since provoked more embarrassment than scholarship. The poet though was quite clear about what he meant: ‘I wanted all my poetry’, he said, ‘to be spoken on stage or sung.’ How much this aural intensity and oral imperative must affect its genesis, matter, and direction we are only just beginning to understand.
In a long and detailed study Ronald Schuchard has picked up the gauntlet where Yeats had thrown it and tried to recover, through letters, personal accounts, and contemporary articles, the history of Yeats’s repeated attempts to have his poetry spoken or sung. At the book’s heart is Yeats’s ten-year effort to have poetry spoken with careful intonation to a stringed instrument known as the psaltery, a subject on which Schuchard has already penned brief articles. Its ten chapters do however roam further afield, with the thought of tracing a continuous line from early theatrical performances near the Yeats home in Bedford Park, west London, featuring a beautiful and exquisite verse-speaker called Florence Farr (soon the voice of Yeats’s psaltery performances) right through to an account of Yeats’s innovative radio broadcasts of poetry and music in the 1930s. Indeed these outside chapters contain the most illuminating material, accounting for Yeats and Ezra Pound’s enthusiasm for the songs of Rabindrath Tagore, describing impressions of Yeats’s verse-speaking at Oxford, and allowing the influence of Farr’s speaking on the burgeoning Imagist movement for once to be seen in proper relief.
