Yeats e la musica. Modeste note per l’istruttoria di una ricerca

The study of the relationships between William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) and music has always suffered (and, broadly speaking, continues to suffer) from oversimplification and banalization, both founded on the fact that Yeats himself admitted his musical incompetence more than once, as Yeatsian scholars often keep repeating without appropriate inspection. This paper intends to suggest that, even beyond Yeats’s hasty admissions, in fact his musico-literary experience had depth, intensity, insight and width comparable to those of other great protagonists of the literary world of any literary period and interacted with more radically strategic anthropological and cultural foundations.