Tag Archives: William Butler Yeats

I Must Arise and Go There

By Robin Bates | Published: July 28, 2019

Monday Listening to the humming of our hummingbirds the other day, I thought of Yeats’s reference in “The Lake Isle of Inisfree” to linnet wings. I don’t think we have linnets in America and I can’t imagine that they make any sound at all, much less hummingbird buzzing. Still, Yeats conjures up images of feathery […]

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Poetry, a Mystical Key to the Beyond

By Robin Bates | Published: July 13, 2019

spiritual Sunday I’ve recently been reading Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, which is helping me better understand how poetry aids us in our search for God—or if that sounds too institutional, for the numinous. Owen focuses on the spiritual exploration underway at the turn of the […]

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Do Endings Reveal Meaning of Life?

By Robin Bates | Published: February 10, 2019

Monday My wife Julia alerted me to an intriguing although somewhat frustrating article in Atlantic about the end of time. Drawing on Frank Kermode’s 1967 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Megan Garber wrestles with an issue recently raised by The Washington Post: how do we live with constant reminders […]

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Among Slovenian School Children

By Robin Bates | Published: December 6, 2018

A visit to an 8th grade English class in Slovenia had me thinking of Yeats’s “Among School Children and appreciating the educational process.

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Apples That Taste of Earth and Song

By Robin Bates | Published: July 27, 2018

Apples bring out poetic creativity, all the more so because the West has seen them as the forbidden fruit. I share here a selection of tempting apple poems.

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Sleeping Outdoors

By Robin Bates | Published: July 10, 2018

Poetry adds an extra dimension to sleeping outdoors.

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Prayer for My Granddaughters

By Robin Bates | Published: September 10, 2017

As Hurricane Irma bears down on Florida after having devastated several islands, I find myself delivering up Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter.”

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Can Poetry Stop This Man?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 22, 2017

Poetry may not have been able to stop Donald Trump, but it has its ways of mounting resistance. Poems by Tennyson, Auden, and Yeats explain how.

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The Terrible Beauty of Political Fanatics

By Robin Bates | Published: March 29, 2016

While many are celebrating the centenary of Ireland’s Easter uprising, Yeats’s famous poem on the rebellion offers us cautions about how to respond to such acts of rebellion today.

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