Honestly, if one of the first things everyone knew about me was that I spent 35 years pining for one woman, and later said woman and her daughter because she married a long time ago, then forget the fact that she inspired a lot of my poetry, I would simply burn it all and bury myself from the burning embarrassment of being such a loser.
But such was the life of William Butler Yeats.
Every one of the poets from that period seemed to have led a bit of that life, didn’t they? T.S. Eliot too— he had a fascinating fear of decay and mortality. You see it in his work of course, but he also left his wife when she fell mentally ill, for a younger hot thing— some 20 y/o when he was in his 40s or 60s. We see you running away from facing the inevitability, man, a profound line about death doesn’t change that.
So it’s fascinating to read their works with this background context available to you, it’s such an insight into the human psyche. I’ve talked about this a little before, on how we sort of look to our poets and songwriters for answers, to help make sense of all the madness, and without fail, they happen to be some of the most flawed human beings in history. Or in less intense cases, they don’t have the answers we seek from them. It reminds me again of an interview with Grian Chatten from the band Fontaines D.C., in the NME back in 2022. He’s a poet for the modern day, I’ll grant him that easily. He convinced me recently that lyrics can work quite well standing alone as poetry and not come off as naff or aloof, or can still feel quite prescient and not pretentious or removed from the live setting in which they will be performed, making eye contact with you in a sweaty theatre (slowly getting larger, as I’m pleased to see, with the U.K. and Dublin arena shows planned on their tour this year for their upcoming fourth album Romance). They can still connect with the loud guitars and drums pounding behind them.
Grian said to the NME, in light of their debut album Dogrel and his painting of a Dublin life, presenting you with the characters, the contradictions, the scenarios lived in his Dublin, his portrayal led to people turning to him for answers, when I think what you and him would both know deep down is that you’re really looking to him for a depiction of your world in the words that hit the soul, in a way that romanticises the moments you want to remember, and can beautifully frame the injustices of the bad ones. Not answers. Just a painting.
He said, people are looking to me for answers. What the fuck do I know?
Same as it had always been, hasn’t it? He doesn’t have answers. Yeats didn’t have answers. T.S. Eliot didn’t have answers— despite his vivid depictions of loss and decay, he still couldn’t deal with the thought of it himself. But all it does do, is let you read a work through the lens of your own life, and then look at it again through the eyes of a complex human being, the poet. It’s an option that is available to you. Some people do subscribe to ‘death of the author’, but if you’d like to explore the mind of someone who isn’t you, if you aren’t afraid to feel uncomfortable, different, or in the skin of a very different person, it’ll open you up to new thoughts, which don’t have to be yours.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is, don’t be afraid to read something you don’t agree with. Bad thoughts aren’t contagious. You can approach someone else’s work knowing it’s a complex read, and that can be an intriguing and insightful read. However, I do still hesitate to put this post before the poetry people on WordPress, because I don’t think most people on the poetry canon side of the internet will appreciate me calling one of the crown princes of 20th century Irish poetry and literature a loser. Oh well.
MattWilliamsonLive 