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Edward Calvert, The Chamber Idyll
KC’s ‘nightcap’ during the first Culture Club meeting was Edward Calvert’s ‘The Chamber Idyll’. Here is a reproduction of the engraving from the Tate site: Edward Calvert, The Chamber Idyll, 1831 The Tate says: ‘”The Chamber Idyll” is a truly original image, and is usually regarded as Calvert’s masterpiece. It is a sensuous vision of…
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TS Eliot and Meaning in Poetry
My background reading on the late Yeats poems drew me to the CK Stead book, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. Here I discovered an interesting perspective on the ‘meaning’ of poetry, derived from Eliot’s literary criticism (and clearly, informing his own poetry). Stead says: ‘For Eliot, as for Yeats, a poem is to be…
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Swans in Sibelius and Yeats
One of the links between the two subjects of our first assignment was the image of the swan. In Yeats, this crops up in many phases of his poetry, but in his late work it comes to represent a kind of nobility and pride, and even the soul itself. In the Tower he speaks of…
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Views on the Late Poetry of WB Yeats Pt. 2
My view on the Yeats poems we looked at was diametrically opposed to that of KC. For me this poetry represents some deeply moving, and beautifully expressed, attitudes towards old age, death, love and art. Two books gave me some great insights: The New Poetic: Yeats To Eliot by CK Stead and WB Yeats: A…
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Views on the Late Poetry of WB Yeats
In our second session, held on the 20th July 2006, KC quoted Auden on Yeats: This is from the essay on Yeats and Modernism in the Cambridge Companion – and it seems the author lifted it from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Auden. Don’t know when or where Auden wrote it. “As Auden wrote many years…
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First Assignment: WB Yeats and Jean Sibelius
After the first meeting, we agreed on discussion topics for the next meeting, as follows: The late poetry of WB Yeats – 6 poems to be chosen by TT Sibelius’s 5th Symphony Here’s my email confirming the Yeats poems that we ended up discussing: The concensus seems to be that Yeats’s late period began in…
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The Birth of The Culture Club
The four of us who make up the Culture Club first met on the 28th June, 2006. This was at AM’s invitation, with the stated aim of discussing works of art and culture of lasting value with others who have a passion for such things. It was a great night, enjoyed by all, and we…