W.B.Yeats Reading His Own Verse
Yeats is extremely interesting because his life-span ran from the American Civil War to the beginning of the Second World War. He was at one time both Victorian and modern. This recording is from a few years before he died in 1939.
I am fascinated by accents and how they change and this is a perfect example. The interesting thing here is that professional Irishman, Mr Yeats sounds Scottish. Yeats is reading his own poems as he wanted them to sound and therefore the poetic inflection accentuates the accent.
This is not an Irish accent that you hear very often today and in many ways is similar to a West Coast (Gaelic native) Scottish accent, with a touch of Edinburgh sophistication, rather like the voice of Arthur Conan Doyle. Perhaps I am imagining this of course, but that parallel perception would fit well with the reality of Yeats as both a West Coast (Gaelic) Irishman and Dublin sophisticate.