W. B. Yeats’s Radiogenic Poetry

Introduction: Yeats and Mass Communications

“…22 Emily C. Bloom has demonstrated how much radio brought to Yeats's approach to his poetic practice, to his understanding of his own public, and to "the auditory poetics of his late lyrics;" radio, as Bloom shows, "played a pivotal role as a medium through which Yeats performed, publicized, and published poetry at the end of his life. " 23 Radio also provided a whole new grammar for thinking about perception and became the site of another paradoxical alliance of interests, in which Yeats's different and sometimes competing interests as private spiritualist and public poet could be expressed simultaneously. Indeed, the new medium often encouraged Yeats, in his radio texts of the 1930s, to borrow from the spiritualist rhetoric and associations that he had explored as part of his experimental psychical research with George Yeats in the early years of their marriage.…”

“…32 The collaboration that Yeats initiated with the BBC generated more than just broadcast programs: several poems from this period were broadcast before appearing in print, notably "For Anne Gregory, " "Roger Casement, " "Come on to the Hills of the Mourne, " "Sweet Dancer, " and "The Curse of Cromwell. " 33 When writing for The Listener-the BBC publication conceived to complement the Radio Times, which aimed to initiate fruitful discussions of broadcasting-Yeats also produced a slightly different kind of journalism. The text of a planned broadcast entitled "I Became an Author, " published in The Listener in August 1938, is a remarkably candid confession, which comes across as a sequel of sorts to another Listener essay from 1934, "The Growth of a Poet, " and other texts in which Yeats returns to his career as a poet.…”