CarrollBlog 5.23
There's a beautiful new website about a museum exhibit in Ireland featuring the life and times of the poet William Butler Yeats. Among many intriguing things, they have an original recording of Yeats reading one of his most famous poems, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." What I found fascinating was how weirdly he read it. It is one of my favorite poems ever. I have both read and taught it again and again over the years. So I was really thrilled to see that they had an original recording of the master reading THAT POEM. But a line or two into his reading I was frowning and thinking no, no, no. Wrong-- you've got it all wrong: That's not at all how the poem should be read. I've always said that once I finish writing a book, I become only another of its readers and my opinion of what it is about or how it should be interpreted is no more or less valid than the next guy's. I feel the same applies here-- Yeats may have written that extraordinary poem, but he sure read it wrong (imho).
http://www.nli.ie/yeats/main.html