“Music will keep out temporary ideas”: W. B. Yeats’s Radio Performances

The Irish poet W. B. Yeats has been repeatedly accused of being ‘tone deaf’, and he himself on occasion disclaimed his musicality. However, as one of the first poets to take seriously to the radio, his intense commitment to aural communication on the medium discloses an unmistakable musical interest. The accident that most of his broadcasts do not survive has tended to obscure their significance. This paper examines what remains, discovering in the broadcasts a record of experimental musical performances. It uncovers an acute sense of melody in the poet’s own readings and traces the effects of his collaborations with the composers Harry Partch and Arthur Duff. It also describes how his poetry’s articulation of time is amplified and extended by the new medium’s performance space, and how the intervention of music in and between poems might express the lasting of the passing moment.