Word: yeatsian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...like us," Auden wrote of Irish Poet William Butler Yeats, but the truth is that Yeats was sillier, more willing to appear foolish and embrace mumbo jumbo in service to his art. Auden's way was very different, circumspect; his poetry achieved greatness but never reached out for Yeatsian grandeur. He wrote...
...governed by a "Deeper Pattern"; the letter writers slowly merge in the conviction that they are living the first part of their lives for a second time or, as one writes, that "biography like history may re-enact itself as farce." Stasis reigns, history is not Viconian cycles or Yeatsian gyres but the thumbscrew. On this subject, the correspondents begin to correspond: "The past is a holding tank from which time's wastes recirculate . . . History really is that bird you [Barth] mention somewhere, who flies in ever diminishing circles until it disappears up its own fundament...
...That is all that's left when love is gone. Dancing...There is no love in this city...only discotheques." Dancing becomes the central motif of Holleran's book and his characters' lives, the all-important Yeatsian ceremony, the substitute liturgy. They dance at the Twelfth Floor of the Carlisle and in the Garment Center after hours and in Hackensack; they live for love, make careers of it, die from it. Like dervishes, they dance for God; but God is Frank Post's pectorals...
...Yeatsian Gloom. Today, Toffler contends, we are all renters, all nomads. "We have not merely extended the scope and scale of change, we have radically altered its pace," he says. "We have in our time released a totally new social force-a stream of change so accelerated that it influences our sense of time, revolutionizes the tempo of daily life, and affects the very way we 'feel' the world around...
What Toffler calls "a fire storm of change" leaves in its wake "all sorts of curious social flora-from psychedelic churches and 'free universities' to science cities in the Arctic and wife-swap clubs in California." With Yeatsian gloom, he adds: "It breeds odd personalities, too: children who at twelve are no longer childlike; adults who at 50 are children of twelve. There are anarchists who, beneath their dirty denim shirts, are outrageous conformists, and conformists who, beneath their button-down collars, are outrageous anarchists. There are married priests and atheist ministers and Jewish Zen Buddhists. We have...