Abstract
The phrase borrowed for the title of this talk,1 appears in “Upon a House shaken by the Land Agitation” (VP 264). In this poem, written in 1910, Yeats laments the threat posed to Lady Gregory’s estate by a judicial reduction in the rents paid by her tenants. The physical ruin of the big house is contemplated and, beyond and above that, its aristocratic traditions and style of which the culmination is, in Yeats’s oxymoronic figure, “a written speech”. This is said to be ‘gradual Time’s last gift⋯ / Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease’, and it is made, he says, only to those who are already endowed with the “gifts that govern men”.
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Notes
Augusta Lady Gregory, Seventy Years: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory, edited and with a foreword by Colin Smythe (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe, 1973) p. 392.
John Montague (ed.), The Faber Book of Irish Verse (London: Faber & Faber, 1974) p. 345.
John Montague, A Fair House (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1972) p. iii.
Michael Hartnett, Poems in English (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1977) p. 58.
Gerald Dawe, The New Younger Irish Poets (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1991) p. 50.
Seamus Deane et al. (eds), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, vol.III (Lawrence Hill, Derry: Field Day Press, 1991) p. 1313.
Brian Friel, Selected Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1984) p. 418.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, ed. Barbara Rooke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969) vol. I, p. 51: ‘But how are we to guard against the herd of promiscuous Readers? Can we bid our books be silent in the presence of the unworthy?”
Maud Gonne MacBride, A Servant of the Queen (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938) p. 328.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (London: Faber 8& Faber, 1971) p. 16.
Ronald Schuchard, “The Minstrel in the Theatre: Arnold, Chaucer and Yeats’s New Spiritual Democracy”, YA 2, 1983 3–24.
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, new and rev. edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) p. 154.
M. J. Sidnell, “‘Tara Uprooted’: Yeats’s In the Seven Woods in Relation to Modernism”, YAACTS 3, 1985, 107–20.
Yvor Winters, “The Audible Reading of Poetry”, in Twentieth Century Poetry: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Graham Martin and P. N. Furbank (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1975) p. 126.
Paul Valéry, “De la diction des vers”, Oeuvres II, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) p. 1255.
Douglas Dunn, “Audenesques for 1960”, The Times Literary Supplement, no. 4661, 31 July 1992, p. 4.
Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan Education, 1989) p. 36.
See especially Jaques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967) pp. 375–445.
T. S. Eliot, “Yeats”, in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber & Faber, 1957) p. 258
James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961) pp. 9, 608.
John Drakakis (ed.), British Radio Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) p. 28.
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Sidnell, M.J. (1995). Yeats’s “Written Speech”: Writing, Hearing and Performance. In: Gould, W. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 11. Yeats Annuals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23757-9_1
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