Lots of Action at Lady Ottolines Tea Party (1 Viewer)

Johannes

Founding member
If you think Bukowski was the only poet who rose hell, you ought to read what happened when Stephen Spender met Yeats at Lady Ottolines tea party:

I met Yeats, I think probably in 1935 or 1936, at Lady Ottoline Morrell's. Ottoline asked me to tea alone with Yeats. He was very blind and"”I don't know whether he was deaf, but he was very sort of remote, he seemed tremendously old. He was only about the age I am now, but he seemed tremendously old and remote. He looked at me and then he said, "Young man, what do you think of the Sayers?" I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about"”I thought perhaps he meant Dorothy Sayers's crime stories or something"”I became flustered. What he meant was a group of young ladies who chanted poems in chorus. Ottoline got very alarmed and rushed out of the room and telephoned to Virginia Woolf, who was just around the corner, and asked her to come save the situation. Virginia arrived in about ten minutes' time, tremendously amused, and Yeats was very pleased to meet her because he'd just been reading The Waves. He also read quite a lot of science"”I think he read Eddington and Rutherford and all those kinds of things"”and so he told her that The Waves was a marvelous novel, that it was entirely up to date in scientific theory because light moved in waves, and time, and so on. Of course Virginia, who hadn't thought of all this, was terribly pleased and flattered. And then I remember he started telling her a story in which he said, "And as I went down the stairs there was a marble statue of a baby and it started talking in Greek to me""”that sort of thing. Virginia adored it all, of course.

--> http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3346/the-art-of-poetry-no-25-stephen-spender

" a group of young ladies who chanted poems in chorus"?? Wtf?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Spender is a bitch for not knowing what a Sayer is. He's lucky Yeats didn't prison rape him just to show who's top dog. And if Woolf was any sort of lady she would've offered to hold him down.
 
They obviously knew how to party in those days, those wild and bohemian souls.

I mean, instead of being a bunch of crampy self-centered ass-warts.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top