Knocking The Master
I'm delighted to see the second issue of The Dubliner, a literary review intended, among other things, to plug the gap left by the death of the Dublin Magazine a few years ago. May it have a long life in the teeth of all the usual difficulties. It has a long piece on Yeats by the American poet and critic, Yvor Winters, whose breath is both keen and seen. Mr. Winters ob- viously thinks that Yeats is a windy old pompous simple-minded phoney like Shelley, Whitman or Robinson Jeffers. He declares that 'there are greater poems in Bridges, Hardy, Robinson and Stevens, to mention no others, and in half a dozen younger poets as well.' This is splendidly argued knockabout and will give some not-so-secret pleasure to many a young Irish writer who still feels himself blighted by the shade of that tremendous reputation. One of Yeats's greatest nonsenses, according to Winters, was writing. all that stuff about a lot of unim- portant people like Lady Gregory, Major Robert Gregory, John Millington Synge, Shawe-Taylor, Hugh Lane, Douglas Hyde, in addition to all his uninteresting relatives and ancestors. None of these people would have been heard of if Yeats hadn't written about them, he complains. Just like all those dreary thugs in the Iliad, not to mention Dante's Beatrice, Tennyson's Hallam, Wordsworth's old leech-gatherer and that fright- ful neurotic the Scholar-Gipsy.
STARBUCK
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