W.B. Yeats' Apocalyptic A VISION

W.B. Yeats' Apocalyptic A VISION

William Irwin Thompson — 3 recordings in the archive.

The book: A Vision by W. B. Yeats.

Now last time we were talking about the figure of the Millennial leader the profit of a political movement and the way in which Patrick Pearse fitted out the profile of the divided man the messianic figure the head of an atavistic movement tonight I want to focus on another kind of leader of a cultural movement a revitalization movement that fits still the same pattern that Anthony Wallace is talking about and talk about the artist rather than the profit if we kind of look at the role of the artist in society I think it's perhaps best to go back and start with tribal society and move forward to get the sense of the different modalities to the relationship of the artist in time and the artist with his historical milieu in tribal society especially say in the Celtic tradition the bard really is the memory of a preliterate society since the sacred esoteric traditions are not to be trusted to writing and even at the dawn of Western civilization Plato shows a lot of suspicion about writing it weakens your memory it tends to democratize sacred information so that the wrong information gets into the wrong hands and writing is just suspicious as a vehicle of communication so that the esoteric has to be held in the hands of those people who are really prepared for it and in the case of poetry The Bard is a man who in a sense has a calling to it and so there's a kind of shamanistic quality to the Bard there the quality of the memory of a bard in preliterate societies is really staggering even into the 20th century Robyn flower could go out into the Aran Islands and the blasket islands and stop at a wall just by a road to take a rest and a an Irish cousin would come up to him and hail to him and greet him and then as they begin to chant he'd say are you interested in the stories and he said yes and then he began to recite all the ancient legends of Ireland and in the case of this one bard that Robin flow had met he could recite things as long as the Iliad or the Iliad The Odyssey put together this is true for Yugoslavian poets it was true for the bards in the time of…