Comments on: Three Turtles

By: Brenda Schmidt

Brenda Schmidt — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:07:06 +0000

Cool. I’ll track down that book. I just pulled out The Yeats Reader, a book I haven’t given a great deal of attention to, hoping to find a chapter of earlier versions, but no such luck. As I was looking for it, I came across some books that got shelved unread and forgotten about. Good grief.

By: Ian LeTournneau

Ian LeTournneau — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 03:25:31 +0000

I remember being fascinated by that anthology section as well! I just recently came across another interesting story about Yeats’ process in a great book called The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach. Apparently Yeats was hitting a wall at one point and started free writing in paragraphs. When he’d hit some words he would add a few rhymes. The finished poems were remarkably similar, only with line breaks. I highly recommend the book, if you haven’t already come across it. (I think you could actually make a whole academic life’s work focusing only on Yeats’ revisions!)

By: Brenda Schmidt

Brenda Schmidt — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:14:26 +0000

Excellent! I look forward to comparing those, too. If it stops storming long enough. Love the Plath quote. It’s new to me.

My habit of comparing began after acquiring the Norton Anthology of English Literature for a course way back when. In the back is a chapter called “Poems in Process” where you can compare versions of, say, Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways” and Yeat’s “Leda and the Swan”, etc. Seeing evidence of process encourages me.