BUT--what I really want to thank you for is that second link, the one from blockhead. That essay had me out of my chair, going Yes! Yes! Yes!
[rant]
I like poetry, and I am truly awed by a lot of what Yeats wrote but:
1. he was a complete nutter in many ways (his personal mythology probably only equalled for inspired lunacy by Blake), and
2. his Prayer for my daughter is one of the worst poems I have ever read - and by worst I mean it sounds like it was written by a Nazi. Even Kipling never had the gall to be so insulting to women.
It's funny, but we had to 'do' Prayer for my daughter in college - it was one of the first Yeats poems I ever read - and it put me off him for years. I thought anybody who could make such chauvinistic remarks about a woman's place, such sweeping generalisations about her beauty, and such patriarchal pronouncements about her marriage was a person with whom I could have no emotional sympathy whatsoever. Gradually, fighting this prejudice all the way, I discovered works like Lapis lazuli, and Sailing to Byzantium and, of course, The second coming. Even so, thanks to my initial animadversions, I have never fallen into the Yeats cult and am always prepared to take his poems on their merits only (and grudgingly at that) rather than the context of the Irish freedom-fighter/rebel/renaissance man.
[/rant]
Sorry for that, but I had to let off some steam about Yeats and that poem.
