Old, Old, Old, Old, Old
John Kerrigan: Late Yeats, 3 March 2005
W.B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915-39
by Roy Foster.
Oxford, 822 pp., £16.99, March 2005,0 19 280609 2 Show More
by Roy Foster.
Oxford, 822 pp., £16.99, March 2005,
“... embarrassment. Almost the embodiment of ‘old speech’, his clichéd ageing personas (Crazy Jane, Old Tom) repeat themselves shamelessly. You have to warm to a poet willing to tell you three times in as many stanzas that he is, like old Lear, ‘mad as the mist and snow’. Yeats felt enabled by hatred because it both makes the speaker more insistently ... ”