The last minstrels: Yeats and the revival of the bardic arts [Book review]

<p dir="ltr">The premise of Ronald Schuchard's <i>The Last Minstrels</i> is a simple one: to rescue Yeats from the notion that he was a tone-deaf poet whose theories on poetry on music were not to be taken seriously. Schuchard meticulously traces and successfully rehabilitates Yeats's efforts in reviving the art of the spoken word from his early interest in chanting to the psaltery and the establishment of a lyric drama along classical lines. Schuchard takes a broad view of Yeats's revival of the bardic arts as he follows the poet's ‘rhythmic career’ (p. xx) which spanned almost four decades of his public life and involved activities well beyond the romanticized ‘Celtic Twilight’ of the 1890s and 1900s. Schuchard amply and ably demonstrates that Yeats's early ideas about bardic traditions reverberated through his life and work, and were by no means limited to poetry alone. The spoken word involved him in numerous dramatic ventures in Dublin and London well before the establishment of the Abbey Theatre in 1904. Nor were his ventures limited to Irish cultural nationalism. His theories had a marked influence on Pound – and also on Eliot – whose debt to Yeats's prosodic developments seems far greater than anyone has hitherto acknowledged. And in later life his introduction to radio and successive BBC broadcasts of the 1930s gave a new impetus by unexpected means to his desire to bring poetry to the masses. All along, however, the whole point was as he had envisaged it in ‘Popular Ballad Poetry in Ireland’, an early essay from 1887, that poetry was a living, oral tradition, alive in the minds of the people, which was passed on from mouth to mouth. Poetry was something for the ear not for the eye. (Cont.)