The Fascination of What’s Difficult by Kim Bendheim You can purchase Yeats Now: Echoing Into Life here. Its continuing dialogue with writers past and present, from Joyce to Beckett, Heaney, and others, offers up an enduring harvest of wisdom for our age. Its iconography – portraits, photographs, book designs, manuscript letters – illuminates the poems and the life. ![]() This book is an enriching companion to the work of one of the world’s great poets. The poem’s plea – ‘O honey-bees, / Come build in the empty house of the stare’ – addresses readers in any state of physical or emotional isolation. Finding the perfect metaphor for a necessary balm, he spotted an empty bird’s nest and ‘began to smell honey in places where honey could not be’. ![]() Locked in his tower amid the violence and uncertainty of civil war, Yeats felt ‘an overmastering desire not to grow unhappy or embittered, not to lose all sense of the beauty of nature’. For example, ‘The Stare’s Nest by my Window’ is informed by the circumstances in which it was written. By focusing on Yeats’s most memorable lines of poetry, Joseph Hassett reveals new ways of enjoying a body of work that speaks to the twenty-first century. Yeats believed that lyrics can ‘take on a second beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life’. Yeats Now: Echoing Into Life, by Joseph M Hassett Donations of $10 per viewer are suggested for those who can afford to give. This event is free and is available to the public on the Irish Rep YouTube channel and below. Pertinent poems by Yeats read by Obi Abili, Terry Donnelly, Colin McPhillamy, and Sarah Street intertwine the discussion, along with presentations of photographs and artwork that have inspired and informed both books. The authors discuss the relevance of Yeats in the 21 st Century and the impact of his complex relationship with Irish activist Maud Gonne, who continues to intrigue almost 70 years after her death. In this one-night-only live online discussion about the lives and legacies of William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne, biographers Joseph Hassett and Kim Bendheim discuss their new books about Yeats and Gonne, respectively, with Irish Rep company member and Yeats scholar, Rufus Collins. However, it was turned down yet again.A conversation with authors Kim Bendheim and Joseph Hassettįeaturing readings by Obi Abili, Terry Donnelly, Colin McPhillamy, and Sarah Street His final proposal to Gonne took place in mid-1916. So, Yeats hoped that his widow - Maud Gonne might consider remarrying. His rival MacBride was executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Uprising. Gonne wrote to him telling him that they could not continue as a couple: "I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you and dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed and I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too." Nearly twenty years later, Yeats recalled the night with Gonne in his poem "A Man Young and Old": "My arms are like the twisted thorn And yet there beauty lay The first of all the tribe lay there And did such pleasure take She who had brought great Hector down And put all Troy to wreck." The final rejection In 1916, Yeats, aged 51, decided to marry and produce an heir. However, the relationship did not develop into anything. ![]() Though Yeats had ended his friendship with Gonne, the two met in 1908, finally consummating their relationship. ![]() Consummation Gonne's marriage to MacBride was a disaster, and they separated in 1905. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.” Though Yeats begins the poem by talking about his relationship with the revolutionaries of 1916, these lines were a personal attack on John MacBride. He wrote: “This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. Later, in his poem 'Easter 1916', Yeats expressed his dismissive attitude toward the rebels of the Easter Rising, an armed insurrection in Ireland during Easter Week in April 1916, of which MacBride was a part.
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