Eavan Boland
Wave 02:
Nicholas Jenkins and Irish poet Eavan Boland discuss one of the 20th century’s best-known poems, “Sailing to Byzantium” (1926) by W. B. Yeats.
You can find an online text of the poem here. There are some basic thoughts about the poem and some useful links here. Helen Vendler has incisive comments on “Sailing to Byzantium” in her Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (2007) and R. F. Foster provides biographical contexts in W. B. Yeats: A Life, II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939. You might want to visit the National Library of Ireland’s online version of its recent exhibition “The Life and Work of William Butler Yeats”, which includes images of some of Yeats’s manuscript drafts and typescripts of this poem.
Eavan Boland is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, most recently Domestic Violence: Poems (2007). She is the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities and the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. She also serves on the board of the Irish Arts Council and is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters.
Wave 02 was recorded on April 9, 2009 at Stanford University, California.
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