W B Yeats, Selected Poems

One of the great poets of the twentieth century, W.B. Yeats captures the sense of the moral dissolution of the nationalist liberal order in his poetry. The moral vacuum remains though the institutions maintain a semblance of order and rectitude, even as European civilization suffers what appears a mortal wound.
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[@petersmall1574]

You may be interested to know that the movie "No Country For Old Men" is based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name.

[@curiositytax9360]

There is a great film that’s basically a film adaptation of Yeats poem ‘The Cold Heaven’ simply called Cold Heaven from 1990. The director Nicolas Roeg followed it up with a film adaptation of Heart of Darkness for television, which is also great. He made a brilliant film in 1983 called Eureka, about a gold prospector played by Gene Hackman, which is an adaptation of ‘The Spell of the Yukon’ poem by Robert W. Service. I get as much out of his films as I do these written works. He’s very underrated.

[@johnmartin2813]

Yeats was nominally a protestant Christian. Yes. But it's worth bearing in mind that, as an avid student of Keats, he would have been well aware of Keats's notion of 'negative capability'. (Which I prefer to call 'creative ambivalence'.) This can be compared with the Socratic aporia and Coleridge's 'willing suspension of disbelief', as well as with an anonymous medieval mystic's 'Cloud Of Unknowing' and that first century Buddhist poet, Ashvaghosha, 's admonition:' 'Great faith. Great doubt. Great perseverance.' Indeed Yeats once wrote a poem called Vacillation. And he remained as adamantly pagan right to the end of his life as he was also Christian. This perhaps explains why some of his greatest poetry was also his last. Remember what he said: 'Out of my quarrel others I make rhetoric; out of my quarrel with myself I make poetry.' That quarrel with himself was extremely important and is perhaps the source of his greatness. He didn't like to be pinned down. Unlike today's poets he wanted lots of metanarratives not none.

[@johnmartin2813]

Surely 'Spiritus Mundi' is opposed to the Holy Spirit. It is hardly a holy spirit but a mundane spirit. Also the way Yeats talks about it makes it sound like a book. presumably a magic book, perhaps a book of spells. Or a book of mythological creatures.