A taste of Yeats

Reviewing critic Michael Wood’s new study, Yeats and Violence, author John Banville explains that the book comprises chiefly “an extended close reading of a single poem, or, more properly, a poem sequence, "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," which, confusingly, was written in 1921, and was published in The Tower, surely the greatest single volume of poetry of modern times, in 1928.”

The poem lamented the conditions of Ireland, describing, as Yeats put it, “lost peace lost hope.” (Lost commas too.) It captures Yeats’s abhorrence of conflict:

We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.

Wood proposes that, for Yeats, poetry provided a way to comprehend and live through his difficult moment:

Yeats, I suggest, sought to use the lyric as, among other things, a survivable way of understanding history. As if the lyric, the mind talking musically to itself, were finally the best instrument left for hearing both the damage and the music of the world.