w.b. yeats’s “easter 1916”, half-read, half-spoken, by jim norton.

this isn’t even a yeats poem i used to favour, but after listening to it a few times it absolutely transfixes one. and compared to, say, the philip levine reading that was going around on the internet, this really is a superior reading. what i remember is paul cantor saying, when i was doing the 380sequence, how quickly, and how soon, yeats had written it after the whole uprising. most of us can’t write with the same balance about the any of the recent tragedies of our time yet.