William Butler Yeats reading his verse.

Yeats made these recordings for the wireless in 1932, 1934 and the last on 28 October 1937 when he was 72. He died on January 28 1939. The photograph shows him sitting before the microphone in 1937.

Nabokov's "The Original of Laura" to be published

The final work of Nabokov (The Original of Laura) that was left unfinished at his death will be published by his son Dmitri, who also has served as the translator of his father's English work into Russian. Nabokov is perhaps the most misunderstood writer/philosopher of the modern work. More and more scholars and good readers are discovering that Nabokov is a supreme moralist & his works should be read as masterpieces of high humanism that indicts us and our culture of the very things that we project onto him and charge him with... our indictment merely demonstrates that we have failed to grasp and seize the humanism or humanity of the unvoiced in his works - one thinks of Pale Fire, Lolita & Ada in this regard.

April - National Poetry Month

Poetry is the virtue of the language, calling the ancient discourse of human with human to a higher account while calling all humans to a higher angel of discourse itself - joining the subtle with the metaphysical; the modest with the exalted - rejecting the marketplace of indeterminate and expansive meaning and embracing the narrow, clear and precise meaning of that which is itself indeterminate and yet completely vital and determining. Poetry calls us to the artfulness of being. Poetry rejects the pace of modernity and post-modernity and post-post-modernity (the words themselves refer to the absurdity with which we have disturbed language) and the habituated frontal-lobe thinking without reflective morality or humanity.

E.A. Robinson d. April 5, 1935

"How Annandale Went Out"

“They called it Annandale—and I was there
To flourish, to find words, and to attend:
Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend,
I watched him; and the sight was not so fair
As one or two that I have seen elsewhere:
An apparatus not for me to mend—
A wreck, with hell between him and the end,
Remained of Annandale; and I was there.

“I knew the ruin as I knew the man;
So put the two together, if you can,
Remembering the worse you know of me.
Now view yourself as I was, on the spot—
With a slight kind of engine. Do you see?
Like this … You wouldn’t hang me? I thought not.”

_____________________________
The voice is that of a doctor about Annandale who has commited suicide - Annandale is clearly EA's older brother Dean (seen in photo below), the doctor is also Dean - a rich and profound reading of the human struggle and the failure to exist.

Horace Dean Robinson, M.D.

Robinson Family Home

See:
http://www.earobinson.com/pages/sites/site02.html - a virtual tour of Robinson's Gardiner, Maine.

They All Forget - Robert Frost

Robert Frost
from, "Out, Out"

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

The Emptiness Within - Robert Frost

Robert Frost
from, "Desert Places"

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
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Looking out into the night sky and observing the utter blankness between the stars - the emptiness of space the poet responds in a comparative analogy - the complete desolate nothingness of the heavens fail in comparison with the 'desert places' within. I invite you to read the entire poem. It is a terrifyingly honest struggle with the vast neutrality of existence and one's existential sense of utter emptiness; the void within, the desert.