"Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top"
About this Quote
Yeats lands here like a craftsman banging his fist on the workbench: stop confusing raw feeling with finished art. The line is an order, not a suggestion - and the barked imperatives ("learn", "sing", "scorn") matter as much as the meaning. He’s not romanticizing inspiration; he’s policing standards. "Well made" is the giveaway: poetry as joinery, not therapy. If the poem doesn’t hold together, Yeats implies, it doesn’t deserve the public air.
The subtext is generational and national. Addressing "Irish poets" isn’t just hometown pride; it’s a warning against a young literary culture getting drunk on its own symbolism, its own political urgency, its own hunger to be seen. In Yeats’s Ireland, art was constantly being recruited - for the Revival, for nationalism, for moral instruction. He’s arguing that the only way to serve a culture is to refuse its sloppiness. "Scorn" is harsh, but strategic: contempt as quality control, a social pressure to keep the craft from collapsing into amateurish posturing.
"All out of shape from toe to top" turns bad poems into grotesque bodies, a physical failure. That imagery is snobbish on purpose: Yeats making ugliness embarrassing. Contextually, it’s the mature Yeats looking back at early enthusiasms and watching new writers repeat the same mistake - mistaking intensity for form. The barb is also self-directed, the voice of someone who learned the hard way that myth and music only last when the stanza does.
The subtext is generational and national. Addressing "Irish poets" isn’t just hometown pride; it’s a warning against a young literary culture getting drunk on its own symbolism, its own political urgency, its own hunger to be seen. In Yeats’s Ireland, art was constantly being recruited - for the Revival, for nationalism, for moral instruction. He’s arguing that the only way to serve a culture is to refuse its sloppiness. "Scorn" is harsh, but strategic: contempt as quality control, a social pressure to keep the craft from collapsing into amateurish posturing.
"All out of shape from toe to top" turns bad poems into grotesque bodies, a physical failure. That imagery is snobbish on purpose: Yeats making ugliness embarrassing. Contextually, it’s the mature Yeats looking back at early enthusiasms and watching new writers repeat the same mistake - mistaking intensity for form. The barb is also self-directed, the voice of someone who learned the hard way that myth and music only last when the stanza does.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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