According to Wikipedia "an incident in Virgil's Aeneid, in which Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough taken from a sacred grove to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission". It must help to have knowledge of the weird mystical belief system derived from the Order of the Golden Dawn (the gyres etc) but I find this and The Second Coming still work anyway. Incidentally when one who clearly knows what talking about nominates a 'greatest' I do find that helpful. Wonder if you share my high opinion of Wallace Stephens?
Well my second ever post on 'About Mountains' was Eliot (Rannoch by Glencoe) and I've two W Stephens ones lined up for when he comes out of (c) on 1st Jan 2026 (Snow Man and Poem that took the place of a mountain). Guess I should look out for a Yeats mountain themed one...
Hmmm not sure. There's a bit of hillwalking but the mountain is a tiny model carved in blue stone... I'll read it again. There's some good mountain poems by Auden and I think Spender.
I confess this is one of those poems that always feels opaque to me. And somehow the more I read it, the less I understand. Phrases and images chime for me, but the overall whole... I can't quite grasp it in an intuitive way or really appreciate it. I'm still looking for a key that will unlock it for me.
I waver back and forth between Yeats and Eliot as the greatest of recent times. But it's almost an apples-oranges thing. Yeats is the greater natural genius, certainly.
Speaking of Rilke, over the past couple of years I've read the Duino Elegies several times, in different translations, thinking that there was something there that I would really like, maybe even needed. I finally concluded that Rilke *in English* is just not great poetry. At least not in the Elegies, though there are some wonderful bits. No poetry is truly translatable but some travels better than others.
Jody and I were just talking about the Duino Elegies last week --- we were agreeing that for each of us, there had been a moment in youth when those poems (which I read in Stephen Mitchell's translation) had seemed like the most profound thing we had ever encountered. "Every angel is terrifying" seemed to me, at least briefly, a prophetic line like no other. I haven't read them in a long time, and I can't read them in German, but Jody was asserting that they don't hold up in the same way, and I'm willing to believe that I wouldn't find them as profound now, which is maybe why I haven't gone back to them in a long time. I'd rather leave them there, in the place in my memory where they were that profound.
And yes, I was also thinking about where Eliot would fall in this Greats lineup. In general I'm kind of leery of that whole impulse to name greater-thans and lesser-thans. I think the more important and helpful question to ask, maybe, is this: "Great in what way?" (I say this consciously as one with a great love for many poets whose field of vision looks smaller, less ambitious, more domestic and immediate, who I guess would be called "minor" --- yet I find them marvelous).
"Every angel..." yes, actually I was enchanted by that when I encountered it in my 20s. I don't even know now why I had bought the book. The first ten or twenty lines seemed terrific. Then I got bogged down. "wut" :-) And I'm not sure I ever got past the second elegy until this recent attack. Which, I should say, was partly due to discovering that Romano Guardini had written a book about the Elegies. I thought "there must be something there." I never finished the Guardini book.
I definitely do not recommend reading either Rilke or Guardini at bedtime. Zzzzzz.... That may have been part of my problem. Still, I don't have that many years left and am probably not going to go back to them. Too much else to read.
"In general I'm kind of leery of that whole impulse to name greater-thans and lesser-thans."
Most certainly. But I still find myself doing it anyway. And I have a great weakness for, so to speak, the underdog in all the arts--the "minor" artist for whom I have some special personal affinity.
Yes --- I'm leery, but I recognize and acknowledge greatness, as in Yeats, certainly in this poem. I think you just have to. If not Yeats, then somebody, depending on what you understand the parameters of greatness to be. There are these giants in the earth, and I think it's right that there are, even when I'm really interested in the spare and strange.
A propos of nothing, maybe, I remember watching two poets once kind of circle each other in a group, and face off. It was like watching two cats size each other up. When one of them left the room, the other one said, "She wants to be a great.poet. Whatever that means." It was a peculiarly cutting remark.
I worry that a uneasiness about nominating someone as the greatest can turn into a sneer at the unenlightened who hold such atavistic and vulgar views about the very idea of greatness. Not that any of our readers do this, but often when one hears rejection of lesser and greater, it comes with a self-congratulation about the speaker's superiority.
Still, I know what Sally Thomas means about shying away from such strong assertions, which is why I qualified the claim about the greatness of Yeats as what I personally hold. And, of course, I could be wrong.
I worry about that, too. And I don't disagree with anything you've said about Yeats here, or with the idea of greatness. I love him, and I think you're probably right in the claim that you make. I'd have trouble designating just one figure, but then I'm a waffler.
And I suppose what really bothers me about rankings is who gets ranked as minor, and why, particularly when that becomes a reason to dismiss a body of work (again I think of Herbert, particularly).
The work of making the case for the greatness of someone dismissed as a minor figure — that's a young critic's job and a lot of fun. I find certain minor poets fascinating, while not thinking them major, by which I think I mean writers who have one gift so much greater than their others that it feels major. Wodehouse's diction in prose, for example. J.V. Cunningham's concision in poetry. But I think a certain grandeur is necessary to be be thought major (although grandeur by itself is not enough, which is what I, unfairly, tend to think of Shelley).
Yes the same here. I loved the Duino Elegies When I was in my late teens, and I just don’t want to disturb that memory. I remember my mother rereading some German classic she had adored as a teenager - maybe Elias Canetti? - And saying mournfully that it was one more boring German novel.
I couldn't take Canetti's novel or "Crowds and Power," but his three memoirs remain among my favorite books. I don't castigate anyone's taste, of course.
" In general I'm kind of leery of that whole impulse to name greater-thans and lesser-thans. I think the more important and helpful question to ask, maybe, is this: "Great in what way?" (I say this consciously as one with a great love for many poets whose field of vision looks smaller, less ambitious, more domestic and immediate, who I guess would be called "minor" --- yet I find them marvelous)."
I feel rather the same. Recently I was listening to a poetry podcast that was discussing whether a poet was a major vs minor poet and I found the discussion left a sour taste in my mouth. And I think you're getting at something of why that is: so much of the discussion of greatness seemed to hinge of greatness of ideas or scope and I do like littleness and domesticity and yes I do find myself drawn somewhat more to poems that are less ambitious and of smaller scope.
I'm also perhaps less interested in evaluating a poet or their talent and more interested in the poems themselves. I mean there are poets I do care for and I can understand and agree with what people mean when they point to someone as a major talent. But that doesn't much sway my interest or taste. I'm not talking so much about craft as the idea of scope or importance.
Melanie, you're probably aware of Phyllis McGinley, but in case you're not: I think a lot of her definitely small and domestic work is wonderful. I think she is typically filed under "light verse" but to my taste she's often more.
It had been probably twenty years since I read her, so last night I picked up her collection Times Three, "selected verse from three decades," opened it at random, and read the first poem my eyes fell on. It's a beautifully crafted sonnet called "Occupation: Housewife" and it deals better with the isolation of the 20th century middle class housewife far more effectively and sympathetically than the Betty Friedan school does. In part that's because it's simply clear-eyed, without a layer of ideological belligerence. The poem immediately preceding it, "Community Church," is a sketch of a liberal Protestant minister which, I remember now, was considered worthy of inclusion in the great old textbook Sound and Sense.
There's a very appreciative foreword by Auden, who seems to have admired her greatly. He does refer to her work as "light verse" but he clearly encompasses something more than jokes in the term.
Yes --- not that I don't believe that there are larger and smaller visions, or that a large vision, like Yeats's transcendent vision here of art and eternity, is a quality of greatness. I do believe that. Maybe it says something not so flattering about me that even believing that, I still love the small and intimate. In these discussions, it's hard not to feel that valuable things sometimes get dismissed by people who don't understand the value of those things, because they're outside the parameters of that particular conversation's consideration of "greatness." And that, I think, is a problem. In these conversations, what are we saying we value? And in saying so, what are we neglecting to value? (I think of Eliot's early dismissal of George Herbert as a minor, because a devotional, poet --- though Eliot later amended that opinion. Herbert actually comes in for a lot of dismissal . . . Yvor Winters seems to have liked "Church Monuments" but not much else. And that seems to tell me more about the mind of the critic than it does the merits of the poet . . . ).
Yes, the best critics do have interesting, perceptive minds, and their criticism is as fascinating an art, in its way, as the poems they write about. I think that's certainly true of Eliot --- who again, later revised his opinion of Herbert, but even his initial view, though I disagree with it, is interesting and in pursuit of something.
I hate awfully to sound so pedantic, but are there really criss-crossed vowels and chiasmus of assonance in "no country for old men. The young"? Chiasmus would, I believe, require
nO cOUNtry yOUNg Old.
"The art of the state" as opposed to "the state of the art" would be a classic example.
"an ability to make a difficult poem flow as though it weren’t difficult"--fine observation. Part of it seems to be the poet assuming the position of uttering the consensus of the wise. A Homeric pose. Others have seen and know these things. They are not peculiar to the poet as an individual.
Thank you, Joseph, for this and your daily labor in the vineyard. For a few years back when I wrote a series of Poem Talks. Your Poems Ancient and Modern nudge me to pick that up again, yet you are doing such terrific work here. It's a great service. I agree with you about Yeats in the last century-plus. There is Emily Dickinson, and Yeats. I hope we meet sometime. Your spirit feels close to me.
One of my favorites since high school, a favorite before I put much thought as to what it meant. Now I tend to think that one "artifice of eternity" is his collected poetry, unageing now but perhaps not always. I'd never seen the parallel with "Lake Isle of Innisfree," a fine addition to my understanding.
I don’t know very much about it but from my ignorance, I do agree that Yeats is the best of his time. It’s a very interesting point that the theme of Byzantium is not so different from Innisfree. There’s a nostalgia for an iconic perfection.
"Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is"
Lines that make you say "Ouch."
According to Wikipedia "an incident in Virgil's Aeneid, in which Aeneas and the Sibyl present the golden bough taken from a sacred grove to the gatekeeper of Hades to gain admission". It must help to have knowledge of the weird mystical belief system derived from the Order of the Golden Dawn (the gyres etc) but I find this and The Second Coming still work anyway. Incidentally when one who clearly knows what talking about nominates a 'greatest' I do find that helpful. Wonder if you share my high opinion of Wallace Stephens?
Wallace Stevens is great. I favor him above Williams and the other second-generation modernists. But The older poets Yeats and Eliot I turn to first.
Well my second ever post on 'About Mountains' was Eliot (Rannoch by Glencoe) and I've two W Stephens ones lined up for when he comes out of (c) on 1st Jan 2026 (Snow Man and Poem that took the place of a mountain). Guess I should look out for a Yeats mountain themed one...
"Lapis Lazuli," maybe . . .
Hmmm not sure. There's a bit of hillwalking but the mountain is a tiny model carved in blue stone... I'll read it again. There's some good mountain poems by Auden and I think Spender.
Well, yes, it's definitely a model mountain, all in miniature! But it's the Yeats mountain that comes readily to my mind.
I confess this is one of those poems that always feels opaque to me. And somehow the more I read it, the less I understand. Phrases and images chime for me, but the overall whole... I can't quite grasp it in an intuitive way or really appreciate it. I'm still looking for a key that will unlock it for me.
I waver back and forth between Yeats and Eliot as the greatest of recent times. But it's almost an apples-oranges thing. Yeats is the greater natural genius, certainly.
Speaking of Rilke, over the past couple of years I've read the Duino Elegies several times, in different translations, thinking that there was something there that I would really like, maybe even needed. I finally concluded that Rilke *in English* is just not great poetry. At least not in the Elegies, though there are some wonderful bits. No poetry is truly translatable but some travels better than others.
Jody and I were just talking about the Duino Elegies last week --- we were agreeing that for each of us, there had been a moment in youth when those poems (which I read in Stephen Mitchell's translation) had seemed like the most profound thing we had ever encountered. "Every angel is terrifying" seemed to me, at least briefly, a prophetic line like no other. I haven't read them in a long time, and I can't read them in German, but Jody was asserting that they don't hold up in the same way, and I'm willing to believe that I wouldn't find them as profound now, which is maybe why I haven't gone back to them in a long time. I'd rather leave them there, in the place in my memory where they were that profound.
And yes, I was also thinking about where Eliot would fall in this Greats lineup. In general I'm kind of leery of that whole impulse to name greater-thans and lesser-thans. I think the more important and helpful question to ask, maybe, is this: "Great in what way?" (I say this consciously as one with a great love for many poets whose field of vision looks smaller, less ambitious, more domestic and immediate, who I guess would be called "minor" --- yet I find them marvelous).
"Every angel..." yes, actually I was enchanted by that when I encountered it in my 20s. I don't even know now why I had bought the book. The first ten or twenty lines seemed terrific. Then I got bogged down. "wut" :-) And I'm not sure I ever got past the second elegy until this recent attack. Which, I should say, was partly due to discovering that Romano Guardini had written a book about the Elegies. I thought "there must be something there." I never finished the Guardini book.
I definitely do not recommend reading either Rilke or Guardini at bedtime. Zzzzzz.... That may have been part of my problem. Still, I don't have that many years left and am probably not going to go back to them. Too much else to read.
"In general I'm kind of leery of that whole impulse to name greater-thans and lesser-thans."
Most certainly. But I still find myself doing it anyway. And I have a great weakness for, so to speak, the underdog in all the arts--the "minor" artist for whom I have some special personal affinity.
Yes --- I'm leery, but I recognize and acknowledge greatness, as in Yeats, certainly in this poem. I think you just have to. If not Yeats, then somebody, depending on what you understand the parameters of greatness to be. There are these giants in the earth, and I think it's right that there are, even when I'm really interested in the spare and strange.
A propos of nothing, maybe, I remember watching two poets once kind of circle each other in a group, and face off. It was like watching two cats size each other up. When one of them left the room, the other one said, "She wants to be a great.poet. Whatever that means." It was a peculiarly cutting remark.
I worry that a uneasiness about nominating someone as the greatest can turn into a sneer at the unenlightened who hold such atavistic and vulgar views about the very idea of greatness. Not that any of our readers do this, but often when one hears rejection of lesser and greater, it comes with a self-congratulation about the speaker's superiority.
Still, I know what Sally Thomas means about shying away from such strong assertions, which is why I qualified the claim about the greatness of Yeats as what I personally hold. And, of course, I could be wrong.
I worry about that, too. And I don't disagree with anything you've said about Yeats here, or with the idea of greatness. I love him, and I think you're probably right in the claim that you make. I'd have trouble designating just one figure, but then I'm a waffler.
And I suppose what really bothers me about rankings is who gets ranked as minor, and why, particularly when that becomes a reason to dismiss a body of work (again I think of Herbert, particularly).
The work of making the case for the greatness of someone dismissed as a minor figure — that's a young critic's job and a lot of fun. I find certain minor poets fascinating, while not thinking them major, by which I think I mean writers who have one gift so much greater than their others that it feels major. Wodehouse's diction in prose, for example. J.V. Cunningham's concision in poetry. But I think a certain grandeur is necessary to be be thought major (although grandeur by itself is not enough, which is what I, unfairly, tend to think of Shelley).
Yes the same here. I loved the Duino Elegies When I was in my late teens, and I just don’t want to disturb that memory. I remember my mother rereading some German classic she had adored as a teenager - maybe Elias Canetti? - And saying mournfully that it was one more boring German novel.
I couldn't take Canetti's novel or "Crowds and Power," but his three memoirs remain among my favorite books. I don't castigate anyone's taste, of course.
I enjoy his aphorisms, too--"The Agony of Flies."
" In general I'm kind of leery of that whole impulse to name greater-thans and lesser-thans. I think the more important and helpful question to ask, maybe, is this: "Great in what way?" (I say this consciously as one with a great love for many poets whose field of vision looks smaller, less ambitious, more domestic and immediate, who I guess would be called "minor" --- yet I find them marvelous)."
I feel rather the same. Recently I was listening to a poetry podcast that was discussing whether a poet was a major vs minor poet and I found the discussion left a sour taste in my mouth. And I think you're getting at something of why that is: so much of the discussion of greatness seemed to hinge of greatness of ideas or scope and I do like littleness and domesticity and yes I do find myself drawn somewhat more to poems that are less ambitious and of smaller scope.
I'm also perhaps less interested in evaluating a poet or their talent and more interested in the poems themselves. I mean there are poets I do care for and I can understand and agree with what people mean when they point to someone as a major talent. But that doesn't much sway my interest or taste. I'm not talking so much about craft as the idea of scope or importance.
Melanie, you're probably aware of Phyllis McGinley, but in case you're not: I think a lot of her definitely small and domestic work is wonderful. I think she is typically filed under "light verse" but to my taste she's often more.
I only know McGinley from her delightful memoir Sixpence in Her Shoe. I should look up her poems.
It had been probably twenty years since I read her, so last night I picked up her collection Times Three, "selected verse from three decades," opened it at random, and read the first poem my eyes fell on. It's a beautifully crafted sonnet called "Occupation: Housewife" and it deals better with the isolation of the 20th century middle class housewife far more effectively and sympathetically than the Betty Friedan school does. In part that's because it's simply clear-eyed, without a layer of ideological belligerence. The poem immediately preceding it, "Community Church," is a sketch of a liberal Protestant minister which, I remember now, was considered worthy of inclusion in the great old textbook Sound and Sense.
There's a very appreciative foreword by Auden, who seems to have admired her greatly. He does refer to her work as "light verse" but he clearly encompasses something more than jokes in the term.
In short, I double my recommendation of her.
Sorry, one last thing: I remembered that I had included McGinley in a series on my blog called 52 Poems. The post includes one of her poems.
https://www.lightondarkwater.com/2018/05/52-poems-week-20-ballad-of-fine-days-phyllis-mcginley.html
Looks like all her books are out of print. Time for a McGinley revival.
Yes --- not that I don't believe that there are larger and smaller visions, or that a large vision, like Yeats's transcendent vision here of art and eternity, is a quality of greatness. I do believe that. Maybe it says something not so flattering about me that even believing that, I still love the small and intimate. In these discussions, it's hard not to feel that valuable things sometimes get dismissed by people who don't understand the value of those things, because they're outside the parameters of that particular conversation's consideration of "greatness." And that, I think, is a problem. In these conversations, what are we saying we value? And in saying so, what are we neglecting to value? (I think of Eliot's early dismissal of George Herbert as a minor, because a devotional, poet --- though Eliot later amended that opinion. Herbert actually comes in for a lot of dismissal . . . Yvor Winters seems to have liked "Church Monuments" but not much else. And that seems to tell me more about the mind of the critic than it does the merits of the poet . . . ).
"More about the mind of the critic"--I think that's right. But sometimes the critic has an interesting, perceptive mind.
Poets do set out to right "big" poems--I confess to having done so--but seems like a mistake most of the time, or all of the time , in my case.
Yes, the best critics do have interesting, perceptive minds, and their criticism is as fascinating an art, in its way, as the poems they write about. I think that's certainly true of Eliot --- who again, later revised his opinion of Herbert, but even his initial view, though I disagree with it, is interesting and in pursuit of something.
"Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing"
That which we truly are has no nature that is material, but golden, like stardust.
We live in a form, and drop it, to ascend, to that that is, and perhaps, begin again.
Hi, Jody. I'm pretty sure. Anyway, that's how I was taught. Could probably be confirmed by a glance at Peacham or Puttenham.
I hate awfully to sound so pedantic, but are there really criss-crossed vowels and chiasmus of assonance in "no country for old men. The young"? Chiasmus would, I believe, require
nO cOUNtry yOUNg Old.
"The art of the state" as opposed to "the state of the art" would be a classic example.
So abba is chiasmus, but abab isn't? Good to know.
"an ability to make a difficult poem flow as though it weren’t difficult"--fine observation. Part of it seems to be the poet assuming the position of uttering the consensus of the wise. A Homeric pose. Others have seen and know these things. They are not peculiar to the poet as an individual.
Thank you, Joseph, for this and your daily labor in the vineyard. For a few years back when I wrote a series of Poem Talks. Your Poems Ancient and Modern nudge me to pick that up again, yet you are doing such terrific work here. It's a great service. I agree with you about Yeats in the last century-plus. There is Emily Dickinson, and Yeats. I hope we meet sometime. Your spirit feels close to me.
One of my favorites since high school, a favorite before I put much thought as to what it meant. Now I tend to think that one "artifice of eternity" is his collected poetry, unageing now but perhaps not always. I'd never seen the parallel with "Lake Isle of Innisfree," a fine addition to my understanding.
I don’t know very much about it but from my ignorance, I do agree that Yeats is the best of his time. It’s a very interesting point that the theme of Byzantium is not so different from Innisfree. There’s a nostalgia for an iconic perfection.
I’ve got a nice sweater with dinosaurs on it and people in coffee shop tell me it’s iconic.
Thank you for using "iconic" in a meaningful sense. :-)