W. B. Yeats and Ireland, 1965
By Jessie Wender
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Alen MacWeeney, "White horse, Donegal" (1965); excerpt from Yeats's "Under Ben Bulben."
The Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats was born this day in 1865, in Dublin, Ireland. To honor his hundred and forty-seventh birthday, here's a selection of images from the recently published book "Under the Influence," by the Dublin-born photographer Alen MacWeeney, which pairs excerpts from Yeats's poems with photographs MacWeeney took in Ireland in 1965.
"I'd been living in New York for nearly four years, when a friend remarked that it was the centenary of W. B. Yeats's birth," MacWeeney told me. "I wanted desperately to return to photograph in Ireland, and Yeats's centenary became the germ of an idea that evolved into photographs about him and the Ireland of my imagination. This idea suggested to me a way back and a way out of a stifling New York summer. With no thought of interpreting the poetry of Yeats, but rather with the thought that photographing of the kinds of people, places, and subjects that inhabited his verse could well make a book, and myself possibly a living. Yeats was a heroic subject who wrote with unlimited passion and breath about his life and his country. I absorbed and infused his poetry and writing into my perception and way of seeing, deeply enhancing and enlarging my outlook." Yeats died in 1939, the year MacWeeney was born.
Yeats excerpts courtesy A P Watt Ltd on behalf of Gráinne Yeats.
Jessie Wender, formerly a photo editor at The New Yorker, is a senior photo editor at National Geographic.
W. B. Yeats
Puzzles Dept.
The Weekday Crossword: Monday, July 15, 2019
By Elizabeth C. Gorski
Rembrandt wore one in a self-portrait: five letters.