On being asked for a War Poem
0On being asked for a War Poem, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=10054929 / CC BY SA 3.0
#Poetry_by_W._B._Yeats
#World_War_I_poems
#1915_poems
Photograph of William Butler Yeats taken by Charles Beresford in 1911 "On being asked for a War Poem" is a poem by William Butler Yeats written on February 6, 1915 in response to a request by Henry James that Yeats compose
a political poem about World War I. Yeats changed the poem's title from "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" to "A Reason for Keeping Silent" before sending it in a letter to James,
which Yeats wrote at Coole Park on August 20, 1915.
The poem was prefaced with a note stating: "It is the only thing I have written of the war or will write, so I hope it may not seem
unfitting." The poem was first published in Edith Wharton's The Book of the Homeless in 1916 as "A Reason for Keeping Silent".
When it was later reprinted in The Wild Swans at Coole, the title was changed to "On being asked for a War Poem".
When Henry James asked Yeats to submit a poem for publication in Wharton's collection which was intended to raise money for Belgium refugees, Yeats intended for the poem to state his political position on the "European War".
The poem's original title, "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations," appears, in the words of Jim Haughey, to have a "toysome evasiveness" regarding the politics surrounding the war.
Peter McDonald suggests that the changes in the poem's title reflects Yeats's changing political positions from the beginning of the war until its end in 1919 when Yeats publishes The Wild Swans at Coole.
Although there are minute variations in the wording of the version published in The Book of the Homeless and the one found in The Wild Swans at Coole, the poem's overall form remained the same even as the title changed.
In the first two lines of the poem, Yeats states that it is better for a "poet to keep his mouth shut" t...
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