Looking ahead to "Yeats 2015" and archive around Welsh poet and author Dannie Abse.
On hearing that the Irish government recently designated next year as “Yeats 2015” (to mark 150 years since the birth of the poet) we’ve selected some archive exploring his enduring significance and popularity.
In this episode of In Our Time Melyvn Bragg plus guests Roy Foster, Warwick Gould and Brenda Maddox discuss the poet's relationship with mysticism. Interestingly, whilst Yeats declared “I am very religious” this was very much his own religion combining interests in the supernatural, Celtic folklore, Theosophy plus a fondness for the odd séance.
Also alive at a time of “apocalyptic change” in Anglo-Irish politics, Roy Foster, Warwick and Fran Brearton examine Yeats’s ideas and poetry of the time in "Yeats and Irish Politics". Historian Roy Foster mentions that Yeats “operates on various political levels” and liked to “position himself in Irish History”. For instance although Easter 1916 was written in the year in question the poem wasn’t actually published until 1920.
“Poetry is very important in Ireland to people generally”. Yeats and Heaney: A Terrible Beauty examines the lives of the “two smiling men”, both of whom received the Nobel Prize for literature.
We hear about the impact of the Irish landscape and conflict on the work of both men plus the early influence of Yeats on Heaney and how the latter found his own voice. Hear too, both Yeats and Heaney reading their poetry.
"I’m told diary keeping can be therapeutic…”
This week tributes were paid to Dannie Abse, the Cardiff-born poet and writer who has died aged 91.
Dannie Abse (Copyright: BBC)
In 2007 he talked to Front Row’s John Wilson about how he coped after the death of his wife (in a car crash which he survived) by writing a journal which he eventually published as “The Presence”.
Initially, he was trying to provide himself with some structure, saying that he took the advice of Japanese psychiatrists who suggest that the bereaved write “something personal”.
This is poignant and uplifting listening as Abse describes how he hung onto life.
Last year, aged 90, he mentioned that his collection of poems Speak, Old Parrot would probably be his last as it generally took him 4-5 years to write a book of poetry and that towards the end of life “all the pavements slope uphill”. He added "I miss my wife. Continually."
See tributes to Dannie Abse.
Eloise McNaulty is the Digital Content Producer for BBC Archives
I’m told diary keeping can be therapeutic…”
