Transgressing the written page: W.B. Yeats's radio scripts and broadcasts

The study of Yeats’s broadcasting activity provides an ideal case study for exploring the key features of common modes of radio literature. For one thing, the incompleteness of the available recordings and the evidence of Yeats’ frequent revisions to the texts stimulate new questions concerning the radio script’s unstable position between orality and writing, between ephemerality and fixedness. Yeats’s vocal interpretation of his works in the “fixed orality” of the scant and fragmentary audio materials that survived World War II allows new insights into the creative and transformative potential of poetic performance, showing how the author’s voice “marks the poem’s entry into the world; and not only its meaning, its existence” (Bernstein 1998). This (authentic) pursuit of publicity is in constant tension with an (inauthentic) sense of privacy underlying Yeats’s radio talks, notably “The Poet’s Parlour” and “My Own Poetry Again” (1937). These texts suggest that he developed increasingly effective strategies to transform his public posture into a dissimulation of intimacy. By combining or alternating autobiographical ornament, poetical self-commentary, and general exegetical practice, he set new standards regarding the public representation and promotion of the self as literary author and radio icon.