The Wonderful & Frightening World of W.B. Yeats - BoB 2016
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- Опубліковано 21 вер 2024
- Irish poet W.B Yeats is considered one of the foremost poets of the 20th century.
In this lecture, Dr Stephen Cheeke explores the magical and frightening dimension of Yeats’ life and thoughts that inspired his poetry, challenging the audience to test the limits of their imagination.
"The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write." - W.B YEATS
Whatever “silly” beliefs he may have held, he managed to, more so than any other poet writing in English, to make that language sing as gracefully as the Latin languages. As a composer who has set many of his poems to music, he made that task easy! His poems sing themselves.
This guy's knowledge is all over the place.
6:46 Blavatsky was NOT "head of the Hermetic Order". She was the founder of Theosophy. The founders of the "Hermetic order..." were Woodman, Westcott, Mathers.
Any sceptic with respect for logic must, of course, remain sceptical about scepticism itself which automatically opens one up to mystical speculation. Yeats always followed his mystical intuitions without ever abandoning scepticism completely. That always seemed to me the best route to any dealing or confrontation with that potential which we call 'spiritual'.
There's a translation issue here involving Irish-English.
The native Irish speakers explained to Yeats about the "Síoga" of folklore.
This word has been translated as 'fairies' which has connotations of 'tooth fairies' and wispy airy creatures which is not what the 'Síoga' were perceived to be in Irish lore.
The 'fairies'/síoga were human sized who lived in an underworld and emerged on Oíche Shamhna/November 1st to visit the living.
Their shoemakers were the 'Leath-Chorpáin' (half-body) - rendered in English as Leprechaun.
This was, among the rural folk of Yeat's time, a separate and co-existing religion to and with Catholicism.
The Catholic priests diplomatically ignored the 'fairies' when they did their rounds.
Dukadar o’Ðearest you seem to me to be the wisest person in the room ,please accept me as your student?
Very very interesting
Similarly, elves in Germanic folklore were also basically human forms. Around the same time as the public image of fairies turned tiny, elves did too. Christmas elves still are. But luckily Tolkien changed that perception, although now with pointy ears
Wonderful commentary by Dr Cheeke - thank you for sharing so many insights to this life of WB Yeats.😎
A poet for the ages and glorious imperfect human being.
there is nothing wrong with believing in fairies. What makes me shiver and fear is those who only believe in money and in their ego. A little bit of weirdness and diversity would do the world good.
indeed
Yes-- the countryside of Ireland is vey magical and sensitive Souls can tune in to it...
I am glad that Yeats studied the old folk stories -there is a lot of magic in the history of the planet that is kept under lock & key by those who think they control the Useless Eaters ! -- The Vatican Library should be freed.. Think of the many inventions, creations that came from dreams. - the inner worlds
The more factual and technical knowledge humans acquire, the more people seem to forget or be embarrassed by the knowledge of magic, passion and the soul.
I really love Yeats and find a lot of comfort in his work - especially since the slouching beast has now reached Bethlehem and the birth pangs have commenced.
Brilliant exposition...thank you so much...as a Vedantin with your help, I could understand the total brilliance of his poetical expression. Every rendering blew me away. Auden was spot on in the first quote...but Auden's clever but crass use of the word 'silly' is also exposed by your analysis of Yeats thoughts on the word belief. You portrayed a spiritual giant in a fallible body. Thank you.
Very interesting lecture thanks. You can hear details of Yeats’ life and perhaps see him as batty and easily dismissed. Then you see of the chosen poetry and it’s awe-inspiring.
An enjoyable talk, thank you. Two small points: "gyre" is pronounced "jire", as in gyroscope; and "phenomenon" is the singular of "phenomena".
Excellent lecture
Thank you for giving such an insightful lecture! Your comments on 'The second coming' makes it easier for me to understand the poem.
His poetry rocked.
so glad to watch this lecture! so impressed! thanks a lot.
Yeats simply leaves me breathless and yes, the release from hte the greatest freedom of all.
spectacular talk!
Wow, Yeats was a real seeker. What an amazing character.
A wonderful explanation Dr. Cheeke.
Interesting talk. A small point re what is arguably Yeats' most famous poem - The Second Coming. Some of the words are different in a version of the poem I memorized about 20 years back - it is still my favorite poem in the English Language - see around 26 minutes into clip. For example at Poetry Foundation, it is "twenty centuries of stony sleep", rather than thirty centuries. This makes much more sense if we are talking of the Second Coming of Christ. Further the exact words about the "indignant desert birds" are somewhat different.
As noted below in one of the comments. "A poet for the ages"; The Second Coming seems even more relevant today - it that is possible -, than it did a hundred years ago.
Absolutely. I read it tonight (4-23-24) to a group celebrating Shakespeare's birthday.
Gold For you, Why Yeats Because he loved nature and Ireland , and we have to dream.
I thought it was a wonderful lecture and my University obviously obtained their Yeats details from this lecture because it is _exactly_ what I have been taught about him studying "Irish Literature", to the letter.
Brilliant, witty and informative.
Witty?
Who laughed?
A Poppy Cock Preacher!
🏵🏵🏵🏵🏵🏵🏵🏵🏵🏵
This is an entertaining lecture, but some of the content is sloppily researched or wrong (I am only 7 mins in). In the context of Auden, who really knew his etymology and plays with it meaningfully in his elegy for WBY, it is disappointing for a literary critic to discuss 'you were silly like us' at length without commenting on the fact that 'silly' used to mean something quite different (its root being the German 'selig', meaning 'blessed' or 'blissful'). There's a famous essay (sth 'semantics') from I think '87 discussing this...Moreover, it's plainly wrong to credit Madame Blavatsky with being the head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (see eg George Mills Harper's excellent book on Yeats and the GD for a more nuanced, research-based assessment of his and his wife's roles). Blavatsky co-founded the Theosophical Society in NY and later lived in London, and of course the Order was influenced by her teachings and assimilation of Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, the Kabbalah, and so forth ... But the same is true for, say, Renaissance Neoplatonists, Swedenborg, and, indeed, the Society for Psychical Research...
Make your own video, please.
Members of the lecture's non-specialist audience will be furious to learn of these unforgivable oversights, for that is what they are. Meaningful and Important Research has shown that any suggestion of deliberate omissions made for the benefit of those in the hall not interested in missing the wood for the trees would be irresponsible and, indeed, plain wrong.
@@JamesSmith-pm3wz Hilarious.
Thank you for the corrections.
Only 7 minutes in and dismayed....yes absolutely to selig that rings true...a holy fool...
Misleading description of Maud Gonne. She was an Anglo-Irish women who was born in England and was a Catholic convert. She didn't hate the English she hated the English establishment and its treatment of Ireland and the Irish.
Actually she's not terrifying as he said... She looks like a friend I have and she's a great person...
Yes. Strange description of Maud Gonne. Otherwise, a decent lecture.
Great lecture, thank you!
I studied Yeats in England in the 60s His mystical and occult beliefs were not emphasized Later I got into the Occult myself What joy to find Yeats had been there too My fave poet
An excellent lecture.
Wonderful lecture! For those interested on knowing more about W.B Yeats and the occult there is an amazing book by Susan Johnston Graf titled "W.B Yeats- 21th century magus"
Thank you will try find it 😊
This is a wonderful talk, thank you. I do believe Yeats foretold of the coming New World Order, and what a wonderful description he gives in The Second Coming.
I just read The Second Coming at a poetry reading tonight. 4-23-24) as we celebrated Shakespeare's birthday. We are indeed experiencing the bloid-dimmed tide right now, and the ceremony of innocence has everywhere drowned. Vexed to nightmare indeed.
And let Auden say what he likes, he has clearly never seen a fairy.
I have.
Well done!
Excuse me, but 'Irish peasants' (2:50)? Really? This is the language we are using to describe rural Irish people is it? And you wonder why the Irish still dislike/pity the Brits. You just don't get it, do you.
A nosegay of gardenia, jasmine, and pansy for Prof Cheeke. The silhouettes of the listeners suggest rapt engagement in Yeatsiana. To have been able to condense the quintessential aroma of a protean genius in less than 40 minutes is no mean achievement. It is worth noting that Prof Cheeke delivers the exquisite package in a very sparse, limpid style. I can descry the lineaments of gratified recognition on the countenance of Maud, Iseult, Georgie. and for-ever-young Willie. More of Dr Cheeke please !
❤ I find this an amazing insight in the great poet, lots of intrigue surrounded this great man. This gent explained his life in a way everyone can understand, many thanks.
If nothing else listen to the recital at 36:00...
Hate is that which prevents one from tasting or sensing in any broader spectrum, this or that for which one may be unprepared to appreciate in a greater sens3.
One only need be willing to see something in a different light to cease hating. One does not need to feel any differently about it's palatability to see it it with wonder, rather than hate, which seeks complete abolishment...and it is perhaps little more, ultimately, than a cry of help from fear.
Have to listen again to decide if the speaker also thought Yeats "silly"...as did Auden...
Actually, Madam Blavatsky was head of the theosophical society. There were 3 heads of the golden Dawn.McGreggor Mathers, William Wynn Wescott, /another fellow, whose name I forget. Mathers pretty much took over, eventually. Theosophy is occult but discourages actual magic, for a variety of reasons. How could this lecturer not know this?!?;?!
Thank you.
The attitude here is a bit cynical or condescending. Clearly this fellow has never seen a fairy.
Lots of incorrect history about Yeats magical interests but nevertheless entertaining.
Blavatsky was head of the Theosophical Society - not the Golden Dawn 🤣
Yeats was initiated in London, not Dublin.
These are just a few inaccuracies. Sad he didn’t check these.
Indeed--but wasn't Yeats head of the Golden Dawn?
Maybe Yeats achieved --in the struggle with Crowley[sic] (in the struggle to represent White Magic against black magic)-- a sort of leadership himself of the Golden Dawn...
Yeats was not head of the GD. The leaders were SL MacGregor-Mathers, W Westcott and Woodman. Later on Yeats helped lead one of the temples. He was certainly a significant figure in the Golden Dawn but not its leader.
A total triviality in relation to the general 'drift' of this excellent lecture.
just came across this...other than the couple of factual errors pointed out by many, it was a brilliant and incisive analysis...was wondering where it was going for the longest time...loved the last few quotes that brought it to a close...
"The nonsense of India"? I love Yeats, Doctor Cheeke, but that is some 'cheek' on the part of Auden-dismissing an entire civilisation in four words! How much did he know about the country? It's a shame! All criticism in literature should be an endeavour towards understanding, and avoid demeaning inferences!
Dear Sir, The ailment isn't mine. Respectfully yours...@stevej9058
Did u even understand what he actually meant by that?
@@5minutecalmsNo idea. Could you please tell me?
Fist understand that say something
Starts off with two glaring mistakes. Names HPB as the head of GD yet features a picture of one of the actual founders but fails to identify this.
That’s my great great uncle
Can't find this poem with " a waste of sand": or "thirty centuries of stony sleep"; mine reads "somewhere n sands of the desert", and, it's "twenty centuries" that is, since Christ.
The second coming
Fabulous. Not perfect. I love Yeats but you kept me guessing right until the end. You have something of a better understanding of whom I am.
Chekes's question "Is this silly" can always be answered by, "Yes, very much so!" The confluence of Theosophy (and stuff like it) and Psychonanalysis is not at all strange or unexpected: nonsense joining up with nonsense.
This man seems to have befriended Ignorance, unfortunately Yeats could not, Yeats explored anything and everything that he thought could answer the questions that troubled him.
Well, this was a real joy, erudite, I learned a lot (although I thought I already knew everything about WBY - just kidding!)..
Auden was half the poet yeats was.
I personally find auden boring mostly. Yeats is brilliant
Brilliant
W.H. Auden on W.B. Yeats: "You were silly, like us". On the greatness of poetic foolishness and on W.B. Yeats´ fascination with the Occult.
Sounds like I should read W.B. Yeats
all great artists are drawn to magick........
WB Yeat's appears to be Carl Jung's kindred spirit brother...
Well spoken sir!
*miss (clearly, and beautifully!)
he may have hung out less with allen dulles or max jacobson
And AP Sinnett was helped to set up Blavatsky in Theosophical society in London... by the very real Mahatmas in Shrinigar, the "Tibetan Masters." And the interpenetrating gyres of a Vision are very clear to understand in the 2nd edition of A Vision.
Where did you find the reference to M. Blavatsky as the head of the Golden Dawn?
The etymology of the word silly is played upon here.
# Nice nice 👍 nice beautiful speech,sir Jai ho! 🌍 🇮🇳 jai hind🙏 ☺
One cannot understand Yeats without understanding The Golden Dawn -not by simply reading about it but practicing it's system to understand the experiences Astral Travel to Path Working.
Auden sounds like a common British cultural snob of the time.
And "the nonsense of India"? I took offence. I like him lot less now after having heard this quote of his :\
yeh-- he sounds like a narrow-minded jealous prick.
The word"Silly" has an older meaning of being blessed or perhaps happy. Perhaps Auden knew this and used "silly" to this intent.
I refer to the line in a Christmas Carol "Behold a silly tender child..."
It is surprising that Dr. Cheeke does not seem aware of this. In Hiberno-English to refer to a deceased person as silly would be regarded as at least disrespectful, or even insulting. I'm not so sure it would not hold the same significance in English English. Nor do I think Auden would have wished to be insulting. So, I am not convinced by the manner of the Doctor's dealing with this issue.
4.48 Dissecting genius.
Surely Yeats was merely remaining loyal to Keats's strictures with regard to 'negative capability'. (Which I prefer to call creative ambivalence.) It is actually very dangerous for poets to entertain anything so rigid as a firm belief. It dries up the fountains of inspiration almost immediately. Yeats knew this. So did Rilke. Eliot alas didn't.
In 25:08 and in 25:56 the presenter said /ˈgaɪər/and ALL dictionaries and people I knew said
/ˈdʒaɪər/. Can someone please explain what is his reason for that?
He is mispronouncing it. A mistake.
He is not mispronouncing it.
Well, first of all, the first picture is not merely of "a member of the order," but of S.L.M. Mathers, its chief, whereas Blavatsky was the head of the Theosophical Society, and had nothing to do with the Golden Dawn! Rectification is not relating past traumas to the horoscope as such, although it certainly includes that, but is rather the process of correcting the birthtime using this and other methods. I do not think anyone who knows the book *A Vision,* especially the associated poltergeist phenomena, can possibly believe that it is a fabrication. Surprisingly you don't mention Aleister Crowley, who Yeats hated, but with whom he shared so much.
This is riddled with misinformation and should be taken down.
26:50 ... surely that's "twenty centuries of stony sleep", not thirty.
You are correct. It's twenty.
Magic ¡
The stolen child 🧚♂️for it is written " you must become like a child to enter the kingdom ".
4:00 or thereabouts: So Yeats was silly because he believed in fairies (No, I do not); and then Hindu-inspired Theosophy? Well, what about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who not only believed in fairies but fell for faked photographs of them? And what about Auden himself who clung to the moribund Church of England, which along with its political arm, the British state, condemned, hunted down and persecuted homosexuals like Auden himself? (Look up the life of Alan Turing, one of the heroes of World War II.) I call that beyond silly.
We see but 0.05 (or less!) percent of what truly exists. Visible light only falling within said range. I have seen fairies with my own eyes however. They exist. See through and not with the Eye, as Blake said.
Wow! I didn't know that about Auden! 😮
Pretty sure they said Yeats wasn't silly in the sense that Auden described himself as.
Eliot, a greater poet than Auden or Yeats, was Anglican.
Yeats may have been silly, but he understood the future. Science and technology would destroy poetry...look at it now... MISHEGOSS !
Good Grief!
These Lecturers love the sound
of their incorrect descriptions
and analytical anomalies!
You can see why there are no
more great Poets because of
such ranters!
( Was Yeats Mad? No-one knows)
You DO know that "silly" doesn't mean silly, right?
Could you explain that to me?? I think I know what you mean but I'm not really sure about it...
@@mishababernathy7165 silly, = "seelig" , ancient Germanic word , used in relation to the/their paranormal belief,s , to mean -"sacred, strange, holy , etc, ~ in relation to spirit,s (& mediumship, ), - to a person who does noty belive in the paranormal - this "sacred"- would be "silly" , and so the meaning has become different over the centuries.
Inaccurate and absurd. Looking through the window without entering the house.
Please get your facts right in relation to Blavatsky , founder of the Theosophical movement ( which is very much alive today) It’s very easy to make trite observations about people when your knowledge of them is clearly lacking.
"THIRTY centuries of stony sleep????" How could the presenter get it so wrong? The whole point of the poem (written in the first years of the twentieth century) seems to me to be to reflect on how "things fall apart" after almost TWO thousand years (the actual line reads "TWENTY centuries") of Christianity. The "rough beast" of the closing lines can be seen as the 'rough beast' of SECULARISM.
I believe in fairies. Many people do. Don’t try to suppress cultures and defend yourself as superior to them. Typical Englishman.
#Shakespeare wrote about fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream..
I don't believe in fairies but to suggest people who do are mad is ridiculous 😊
11:16 still one that knows nothing about astrology and tries to explain what he does not know to others who don't know either, those are not called "rectifications" - rectification is the art of rectifying your birth chart to find the correct time of your birth by taking specific dates of past meaningful events ... but you are not reliving them and you have to know the dates of them and what they were... going back to look at horoscopes from the past it's called "solar revolutions" that can be made to look at the future or to look at the past ones from past years. liked the end thank you.
Twilight -- end of day/era, as in Twilight of the Gods. twilight = before night. Bran was Welsh.
@26:52 Yeats wrote twenty centuries!!
نعم ...العقلانية والنزعة الإمبريالية والموضوعية المدرسية ....أسماء مختلفة الخطيئة الأصلية لعصر النهضة والانوار
Blavatsky was not the head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn but of Theosophical Society.
Harris Jason Lewis Sarah Jackson Cynthia
obviously everyone knows madam blavatsky was the president of the farm bureau not the golden dawn😂😂
Why do people read poetry aloud as if it were prose?
It ruins the unique aspects of the poetic form in favor of habitual reading habits.
Why even read poetry if one is going to read like that!
An embarrassing lecture, marred by blunders. Mme Blavatsky, glittering eyes notwithstanding was not head of the Golden Dawn, with which she had no official connection. She founded the Theosophical Society, so the heavy sarcasm and playing for cheap laughs (mostly met with silence from the audience) was wasted. Dr. Cheeke suggested that when James Joyce in Ulysses talked of the ‘snot-green sea’ and ‘scrotum-tightening sea’, he was ‘possibly parodying Yeats’, who was fond of ‘hyphenated adjectives’ like ‘the rook-delighting heaven,’ ‘the mackerel-crowded seas,’ and ‘dolphin-torn, gong-tormented sea.’ The title of Joyce’s novel surely gives the clue to where the finger of parody was pointing. The adjectival-phrases are usually called ‘epithets’, and abound in both the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as in the two corresponding Sanskrit epics the Mahabharata and the Ramyana. In each case one epic is about a huge war with heroic warriors on both sides, and the other is about a long, wandering, perilous journey in which monsters are encountered and must be overcome. In Homer’s Greek we find epithets like ‘wine-dark-sea οἶνοψ πόντος,’ ‘rosy-fingered-dawn ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς,’ ‘fleet-footed Achilles πόδας ὠκύς Ἀχιλλεύς ,’ ‘ox-eyed Hera βοῶπις Ἥρη’ etc. And the Sanskrit epics similarly speak of the sea as ‘blue lotus-like नीलोत्पल,’ and has ‘vishalakshi विशालाक्षी - huge-eyed’ and mṛganayanī मृगनयनी ‘deer-eyed’ for beauties like Draupadi and Sita. These portmanteau descriptors must have been used bards who had to memorise thousands of lines and needed to fill-in gaps or invent whole lines when memory failed. Yeats, recalling Irish poetry was experimenting, it was certainly not a case of logorrhea. The talk also suffered from over-reliance on the sneers and spite of W. H. Auden, who might with justice have been called ‘urine-scented Auden’ or perhaps ‘old-pissy-tweeds’ and who wrote a quatrain which has been called the worst in English poetry.
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
The audience occasionally tittered or laughed nervously when cued to do so, the lecturer at one point saying, ‘that was a joke.’ What a waste of a good subject. Sorry Dr Cheeke, you’re a disgrace to our alma mater.
This is like a member of the tory Party trying to analyse the depths of a gaelic soul..... its like asking a plumber to psychoanalse you... same result. He'd be better suited to writing treatsies on the Oxford boat race.
I don't like all this making fun of Yeats. The occult is somehow a "fact" resulting from divine (creative) imagination, just as science, whose rational "truth" is changing all the time anyway, is also a creative "fact". Because someone believed in flying machines and drew some in the 1500s we have airplanes now. Yeats asks from us, a cognitive shift of expansion... including the rational its possible to expand towards a deeper way of cognition... deeply connected with an imaginal that is ... alive!
I do not understand poetry
Why because I do not understand sultry
I feel like a hen raised for laying egg in the poetic poultry
WB Yeats wouldn't have appreciated clapping much, although he, surely, have indulged them as testimonies of human flaws, confusing respect with clapping, namely, among so many others, like retiring derivations of the Thorn Tree, Cloths of Heavan, his songs of drinking, No Second Troy, etc, etc.
Respect to folklore, mythology is the label or navel of all great thinkers.
India is undervalued by UK superficial thinkers, although greater members like Richard Francis Burton never dismissed a language or a creed for being little or dismissed.
Blake, William and better half, & engravings, a little bit of exageration, maybe?
Ectoplasm and gullible minds are preferable to the closed ones.
Buddhism and Hinduhism, sects of Islam, sects of Christianity, which one would name here, show that we are on the side of hope and knowledge and others on the side og socual control, normalization (not physics renotmalization problem ), strict rationalism, social engineering, strict atheism etc.
Anima Mundi, Gaia so many names for Earth, Humanity, Mars, if as we were the portal of the possible, that We Are.
Thank you so much ✨.
In a world were women are nemesis of men by definition, against a patriarchy maybe only a name for something different, some, by precaution and afraid of a "Second Coming" of his sins, are compelled to live in indignant distance from the beautiful, wonderful sex.
Why's no one laughing 🤣🤣🤣
A half-assed lecture with a poor reading.
W.B.Yeats composed six equals five and seven four initiations, and added all the other initiations, and added a lot of poetry that exists in the Stella Matutina.
In the 1898 1899 Celtic explorations insisted that it be not founded in Egypt or Greece for they must make the land in which they live a Holy Land (Ireland). The Speckled Bird is an autobiographical novel, by the Irish poet, writer, mystic and Nobel laureate in literature in 1923. "A living ladder of souls with God himself..." Neo Druidism from a Gemini, lolz
the oldest of the heroic race and represent keter and hokma, the crown of wisdom...In the kaballah, the Thaumiel qliphoth is the opposite of the Keter sepiroth. It means "Twin of God" and is the place where Satan is (for Keter is where God enters the universe). In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms. It is symbolically personified in dreams as a wise man or woman, or sometimes as a helpful beast.
He wanted to be Blake so badly.
Read Quran before it’s late
This is the most addled, ill-informed rubbish, even by UA-cam's standards, that I've seen in a very long time. If this nit can't even distinguish between Blavatsky's Theosophy and the Golden Dawn, Dr Cheeke (well named) would do well to find a new subject.
Excellent lecture
He wanted to be Blake so badly.
He wanted to be Blake so badly.