“A devil of a lot of trouble”
February 1, 2010
“I am going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm. And that may seem strange if you are not used to it. I remember the great English poet William Morris coming in a rage out of some lecture hall, where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd the Volsung. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into verse.’ It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read. And that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.”
-William Butler Yeats
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Echoes of Airplanes 
This is great, I don’t know where you found it but it’s so interesting.
-Dana
Thanks! I came across it here: http://poemshape.wordpress.com/category/poetry/iambic-dimeter/
I just transcribed it from the recording.
Yeats feeling the need to defend his reading style definitely (but oddly enough) makes sense if you listen to the recording above it of him reading “The Lake Isle of Innesfree.”