This month we pair William Butler Yeats’s famous poem “The Fascination of What’s Difficult” with Dwight Garner’s 2009 piece, “Celebrating Yeats, Revered for Verse, but Who Aspired to a Life in the Theater.”
To view all the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.
Poem
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. During the first decade of the 20th century, Yeats was extremely active in the management of the Abbey Theatre company, choosing plays, hiring and firing actors and managers, and arranging tours for the company. At this time he also wrote 10 plays, and the simple, direct style of dialogue required for the stage became an important consideration in his poems as well.
The Fascination of What’s Difficult
By William Butler Yeats
The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it
had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
Times Selection Excerpt
In a 2009 article, “Celebrating Yeats, Revered for Verse, but Who Aspired to a Life in the Theater,” Dwight Garner writes about the Irish Repertory Theater’s project that year to bring back all 26 of Yeats’s plays — works, he says, which are “overdue for a critical re-evaluation.”
William Butler Yeats, born in County Dublin, Ireland, won the Nobel Prize in 1923 and was almost certainly, as his biographer Richard Ellmann put it, “the dominant poet” of the first half of the 20th century. But what Yeats really wanted to do was write plays.
“I believe myself to be a dramatist,” he declared in 1919. “I seem to myself most alive at the moment when a roomful of people have the one lofty emotion.”
Yeats (1865-1939) wrote 26 plays, and lofty emotions ricochet through them. They are so cerebral and word-drunk, in fact, that they weren’t very well received during his lifetime and are rarely performed today. But they influenced playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht, and the best of them are flooded with the poet’s unruly visions and intense language. T. S. Eliot said, about his own attempts to write verse drama: “Yeats had nobody, we had Yeats.”
…“Most people have never seen a play by Yeats,” [Charlotte Moore, the Irish Repertory Theater’s artistic director] said. “And they are quite hard to do. His language is difficult, more difficult than Shakespeare. But the language is also beautiful. Every time through I hear something new.”
Yeats’s plays, like his poetry, continually evolved and are hard, even from this vantage point, to pin down. Some are folk dramas; others are slapstick farce; others deal with Irish myth. In several the actors wear masks onstage. Others dabble in Yeats’s interest in the occult, an obsession W. H. Auden later scorned as the “deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic.”
…At the end of his life, Yeats wasn’t sure he’d been wise to spend so much time thinking about the theater. In his late poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” he wrote: “Players and painted stage took all my love,/And not those things that they were emblems of.” He wishes to return, famously, to poetry, to “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”
His plays, though, we are glad to have. Spending time with them may put you in mind of Frank O’Connor’s line about visiting with Yeats himself: “Every time I leave the old man I feel like a thousand dollars.”
Here are two activity sheets you can use with any edition of this feature — and you might also check out the Poetry Foundation’s page of Articles for Teachers and Students:
You can also find more poems by William Butler Yeats at the Poetry Foundation.