W.B. Yeats and the Learning of the Imagination

W.B. Yeats and the Learning of the Imagination

Warwick Gould — 1 recording in the archive.

The book: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats by W. B. Yeats.

On Yeats's in the learning of the imagination, the title, of course, of one of Kathleen Raine's books. it was her book Defending Ancient Springs, 1967, that was purchased and read by me when I was an undergraduate in Australia. I still have it. It helped to awaken my interest in the writings of Yeats. I first met her at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 1970 and in '72, where her lectures anticipated her books Yeats, The Tarot and the Golden Dawn, 1972, and Yeats the Initiate, 1986. She shared Yeats's sense that there are ways of knowing more appropriate to the production and reception of art than those of shuffling editors, of whom, as you've just heard, I'm one. "Bald heads," said Yeats, "forgetful of their sins, old, learned, respectable bald heads who edit and annotate the lines that young men tossing on their beds rhymed out in love's despair to flatter beauty's ignorant ear." Mea culpa. I hope Yeats's rebuke propitiates the lofty shade of Kathleen Raine. As an advisory editor of my journal, she wrote of one particular submission, "This young woman, for I judge her to be a young woman, would be well advised to join a magical order so that the veils of illusion can be stripped off her one by one." Advice which I did not pass on. As a poet, Kathleen Raine depended upon centuries of book learning. As an as a scholar, she compounded it. Her book had brought me to Yeats's inexhaustible library of book learning, the British Museum, where occasionally she was to be glimpsed. She took it for granted that the imagination was learned, as had Yeats before her. the most important parts of some of these quotes I put up are those in red. There is only one kind of good poetry, he said, for the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind from the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten tradition. Both are alike strange and obscure and unreal to all who have not understanding, and both glimmer with thoughts and images. I learned from the people themselves before I learned it from any book that they cannot separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea of a cult with ancient technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly separate mere learning from…