This is my fourth and final post in honor of William B. Yeats’s 150-year anniversary. I’m backtracking all the way to my initial encounter with Yeats’s poetry.
Cricket magazine published “The Song of Wandering Aengus” in its September 1974 issue, as a two-page spread with an illustration by Trina Schart Hyman (1939-2004).
Part three of my personal tribute to Yeats and his 150th anniversary.
I remember a scene or two from the 1986 film “Peggy Sue Got Married” (directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Kathleen Turner) in which Yeats’s poetry was mentioned. In case you haven’t seen this movie: Peggy Sue Bodell is an unhappily married, forty-something woman who attends her high school reunion and wonders what her life would have been like if she’d just made some different choices.
She finds out soon enough, when she faints at the reunion and time-travels back to her senior year of high school.
Continue reading “William Butler Yeats, “When You Are Old” / “Peggy Sue Got Married””
Part Two: this one dates back to my teen years.
Even if I had tried, I wouldn’t have been able to keep track of the times I listened to Sinead O’Connor’s debut album “The Lion and The Cobra,” first on vinyl and then on CD. I loved nearly every track on that album, but “Troy” was one of my favorites. It ran well over six minutes long and it really did feel epic (long before that word became overused) — it had highs and lows of volume and emotion.
Continue reading “William Butler Yeats, “No Second Troy” / Sinead O’Connor, “Troy””
I’m doing some studying up on John Singer Sargent this month, for work-related purposes, and last week I was admiring Sargent’s 1908 drawing of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The, just a few days ago, I heard this radio story on WNYC (now illustrated on the WNYC website with the same image!). I didn’t realize until now that 2015 is the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth. All kinds of events are being held in the poet’s honor, so I think I’ll be writing my own series of short posts about Yeats this month, featuring four of my favorite poems by Yeats and the ways I first learned about them.. Stay tuned…
Image: John Singer Sargent, William B. Yeats, 1908. Private collection.
My latest post on Now Smell this is a fragrance review of Frapin’s Nevermore. You can read it here.
Image: Edgar Allan Poe by Félix Valloton (1895), via Wikimedia Commons.
TINSEL CREATION 