{"id":229,"date":"2016-06-27T11:33:36","date_gmt":"2016-06-27T15:33:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/?p=229"},"modified":"2021-10-28T20:21:24","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T00:21:24","slug":"ferry-bishop-yeats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/ferry-bishop-yeats\/","title":{"rendered":"Ferry, Bishop, Yeats"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>What does it mean for greatness to be primal? <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The end of the lecture compares Gilgamesh and Yeats\u2019s \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d as poems that achieve a seriousness of purpose in pitting themselves against death, deploying art as a monument to civilization. The poems do this work in part by acknowledging the elemental truths of mortality\u2014for Yeats, the soul is \u201cfastened to a dying animal.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But even if the language of these poems is largely formal, high, ornate, lyrical, the primal nature of the subject creates a sense of immediacy and an effect of identification\u2014a reader may not have thought of one\u2019s human body as a dying animal before, but once the poet puts it that way, a reader may feel that there\u2019s no turning back. The line crystallizes and expands a thought that was already lurking in the mind. This kind of insight embodied in a phrase and an image, at a certain level of intensity, provokes the term \u201cgreat.\u201d It involves, besides eloquence and force, a sense of kinship or even shared ownership of a thought the poet\u2019s words have clarified. Though the scale of a poem may be grand, this identification with what\u2019s elemental is personal, in a way, intimate.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What does it mean for greatness to be primal? The end of the lecture compares Gilgamesh and Yeats\u2019s \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d as poems that achieve a seriousness of purpose in pitting themselves against death, deploying art as a monument to civilization. The poems do this work in part by acknowledging the elemental truths of mortality\u2014for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12121"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":230,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions\/230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/artofpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}