I don’t go to poetry readings, but I read a fair amount of poetry—mostly older stuff. (To me, poetry ceased to be good when it became unrhymed prose with variable line spacing.) So my title really refers to the three immortal poets whose recorded readings I’ve put in this post.
Ths other day, in connection with something I’m writing, I came upon William Butler Yeats reading aloud one of his great poems, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” To me the lyrical beauty of the work was ruined by Yeast’s monotonic, his lack of pauses, and pompous intonation, which you can hear below.
And it’s not just Yeats, but his near contemporaries T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. Here, for instance is Eliot reading another great work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He rushes through the poem with the same monotone as Yeats. It’s almost as if Eliot doesn’t feel what he wrote.
Finally, another favorite, Dylan Thomas reading his great classic, “Fern Hill,” a remembrance of his childhood. Same issue! All three poets are of different nationality: Yeats was Irish, Eliot American with an adopted accent, and Thomas Welsh. (I have to admit that of all these renditions, Thomas’s is best, as he shows at least a modicum of emotion.)
It’s not that these poems can’t be recited without feeling, as there are examples of better renditions all over YouTube (listen to Jim Meskimem reading “Fern Hill”). So I’m still baffled by the three readings above, and I’m wondering what Oscar Wilde sounded like when reading his poems (I can’t find recordings).
Nabokov, “The Ballad of Longwood Glen”, is read beautifully
James Joyce thought of himself initially (and perhaps mainly) as a poet, so I hope this counts. It dates from 1924.
https://lithub.com/listen-to-the-first-ever-recording-of-james-joyce-reading-from-ulysses/
Dr. Coyne, according to what you wrote you do not like what are generally called prose poems. Since you emphasize rhyme, does that mean you do not like free verse? For example, most of Walt Whitman.
Yes, you are generally right. I’ve written before how I think that poetry nearly always requires rhyme to be good, though there are some prose poems I like. But the “prose poems” I most like are not presented as poetry at all, but are simply beautiful passages of prose, like the last paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead.”
I’m trying hard to think of a great unrhymed poem from modern times, but am drawing a blank. I could probably come up with a few, but the margins of this response are too small to contain them. . . .
The poet, Robert Graves, one wrote that the reason for rhyme and rhythm in poetry was to cast the mind into a light trance which would help open up the meaning and help it stay in memory. I can attest to that as I find it, at 87, much easier to memorize a poem than to remember what I went into the next room to get.
Years ago I opined on this site that poetry was a practical aid to memory that had been elevated to an art form.
Pulling a Fermat, are you?
Personally, I can think of just one non-rhyming poem that I consider great (although whether literary critics agree I don’t know): A Blessing by James Wright
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46481/a-blessing
Thank you for sharing the Meskimem reading of Fern Hill. It is beautiful and heartbreaking.
Just a hasty technical note for now :
I didn’t check the dates of the recordings but assume they are from a time when any recording was expensive compared to later – so the readers might have had strict guidelines to get their piece in without retakes etc.
I mean, even now, from what I gather, studio time is tight.
Indeed. Many poets should be banned from reading their own work aloud, but we can hardly blame them. They are poets not performers. It’s a different skill set.
That was my thought as well. There are skilled writers who cannot act, for example.
I expect there are also poems that just don’t come off well when spoken. It is the voice in your head that is the most evocative.
Mark Twain attended a public reading by Charles Dickens in 1868 and wrote a review:
“He read David Copperfield. He is a bad reader, in one sense — because he does not enunciate his words sharply and distinctly — he does not cut the syllables cleanly, and therefore many and many of them fell dead before they reached our part of the house. [I say “our” because I am proud to observe that there was a beautiful young lady with me — a highly respectable young white woman.] I was a good deal disappointed in Mr. Dickens’ reading — I will go further and say, a great deal disappointed. The Herald and Tribune critics must have been carried away by their imaginations when they wrote their extravagant praises of it. Mr. Dickens’ reading is rather monotonous, as a general thing; his voice is husky; his pathos is only the beautiful pathos of his language — there is no heart, no feeling in it — it is glittering frostwork; his rich humor cannot fail to tickle an audience into ecstasies save when he reads to himself. And what a bright, intelligent audience he had! He ought to have made them laugh, or cry, or shout, at his own good will or pleasure — but he did not. They were very much tamer than they should have been.”
(It is odd that Twain felt the need to specify that he was with a white woman–the future Mrs. Clemens, as it tuned out–Would any reader in 1868 have assumed otherwise?)
Twain also gave public readings throughout his career; perhaps he learned what to avoid from hearing Dickens.
Dr. Coyne, in relation to your reply about the lack of great unrhymed modern poems, how about this one: ‘Try to Praise the Mutilated World,’ by Adam Zagajewski, as translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh? It was in the New Yorker issue with the black cover shortly after 9/11 and is widely available online. Zagajewski once wrote that he did not like rhyming, and the translation is unrhymed.
Older generations in my family had what I call their ‘explanatory’ voice and their ‘oracular’ voice. The difference was especially noticeable in the professorial family members who would switch effortlessly between the two in the same conversation. Explanatory voice was used to discuss the assigned readings, but oracular voice was used to read the passages, be they poetry or biblical passages or selections from Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’. It might have been something they were trained to do in elocution lessons, which all these folks did get as children. I’ve always thought of it as the spoken parallel of the phenomenon of undergraduates ‘writing fancy’ when they think they are discussing something ‘profound’. Still, it grates on me too.
Elocution lessons! I’d almost forgotten that that they were once a thing. My mother was taught elocution in school (40s and 50s) and it paid off: as an adult she had a very expressive speaking voice with perfect enunciation and beautiful modulation.
Hear hear! I’ve long thought the same thing.
Good question. I went to a reading by Robert Frost in 1958 or 1959 at the University of Chicago and was struck by how monotone and expressionless his reading was. You’d think that poets would be better than anyone at reading their own poetry.
Why should we expect good writers ALSO to be good at reading aloud?
I think the best distillation I have heard on this issue is from the script of Finding Forrester.
Jamal Wallace (student): The students have to read in front of everybody.
William Forrester: What the hell’s that got to do with writing? Writers write so that readers can read. Let someone else read it.
Jamal: You ever read your own book?
Forrester: ln public? Hell, no. Barely read it in private.
The reading is really a different skill set than the writing.
Thinking by way of analogy of Bob Dylan, especially in the early years before his voice training. His songs were wonderful and packed with meaning and pathos; a delight to listen to—when sung by OTHER people
Clearly, the singing was not where Robert Zimmerman’s talents lay.
You picked 2 of my favorites! Particularly Prufrock. I agree about modern poetry.
An aside – a close friend of mine named his finance company “Innisfree” from the poem. It provided decades of “Huh? can you spell that?” on the phone. But in 30 years it has become a wildly successful company (I’ve even been a part of!).
So credit to Yates!
D.A.
NYC
J.R.R. Tolkien could read his work.
https://youtu.be/U_TJFhVUOzc?si=YRrKfJz7cGA3r7tQ
Granted, he recorded this epic scene long ago, and it is here dramatized by image and music …. and is it technically poetry … yet it stirs the blood.
Add: here he reads pure poetry. This is the Lament of Galadriel. She stands at the river and sings with proud sadness the passing of The Age of the Eldar.
https://youtu.be/mVACqgDqLno?si=ox__Dgu0j4LKnJtd
This language is Quenya. Tolkien invented it.
Tolkien was fast and rhythmic. No Rob Inglis.
When musicians sing their poetry it’s magic. This is because of added melody and meter. The best readers of poetry—and I am no poetry aficionado—have a bit of melody in the way they execute the reading and they incorporate meter (a cadence) into the presentation. Regarding poets who read their own poetry, I wonder if they wrote it to have melody and meter, or whether they wrote it to be dryly monotonic, as it sometimes seems.
Comment by Greg Mayer
Yeats was pretty bad (though perhaps, in part, for accent and audio quality reasons), Eliot was a bit rushed, but Thomas was fine.
GCM
Yeats was interesting, albeit hard to understand, because he seemed to be singing his poem as much as reading it.
Certainly, it is easier to claim to be a poet if one is not inconvenienced with the requirement of rhyme.
Rhyme is probably harder to write, but it’s sure easier to read!
“I am going to read my poem with great emphasis upon the rhythm, and that may seem strange if you are not used to it,” says Yeats in his comments preceding his reading of Innisfree. He mentions another poet who was angered when anyone read what gave him “a devil of a lot of trouble to get that thing into verse” as if it were prose! Yes, it sounds a bit strange, maybe even stilted, but I think it’s nevertheless enlightening to hear how the great poet may have heard it in his inner ear.
From time to time I’ve asked poets how they decide if something should be cast in poetic form or written as prose, and they don’t seem to have a ready answer.
Victor Hugo said that he tested his poems by shouting them!
https://youtu.be/LDNJCEZYyvI?si=WHorIbcZlJsOC-cg
The Yeats reading (chanting, rather) of Innisfree is notorious, of course. The Eliot reading of Prufrock rather nondescript. But what have you got against Dylan Thomas? I’ve always found his reading of Fern Hill utterly gorgeous. Even better than Richard Burton’s, and that’s saying a lot. Did you know, by the way, King Charles III once recorded the same wonderfull poem? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_69zrPN0Z0
The worst example I know of a poet reading his own stuff is Hilaire Belloc reading Tarantella. Kind of sung. https://poetryarchive.org/poem/tarantella/
Blank verse has been a wonderful staple for poetry in English. I think of Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning’ (‘Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair. . .’), and Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ (‘I cannot paint / What then I was. The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion. . .’).
These are lyric at their hearts, and many more like them in the English tradition.
I worked at an art gallery that held receptions for new shows and the artists. Many artists are introverts and hated the idea of introducing and explaining their art to an audience. Making and presenting artworks were two different thinks in their minds.
I liked this poet reciting her work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ055ilIiN4