In the year of the 150th anniversary of his birth we become more conscious of the ubiquity of WB Yeats in our daily lives. Of the many surprising places that he crops up, one of the most intriguing is the crime series The Sopranos.
In the 84th episode Tony's son, AJ, reads The Second Coming aloud in bed; he is studying it for college. The poem's dark perspective seems to deepen AJ's depression, and the episode closes with a suicide attempt.
But perhaps crime and poetry are not such unusual bedfellows. Paul Perry and Sophie Hannah, who recently read in the atmospheric surroundings of Green Street courthouse, the former home of the Special Criminal Court, would vouch for this. Hannah, who has written verse and crime all her life, suggests that structure is the common denominator between the two forms. Perry, who is also a poet, has just published his second crime novel with Karen Gilleece; they write as Perry Gilleece.
As far back as 1901 GK Chesterton published A Defence of Detective Stories in which he argued that crime fiction was one of the only art forms that give us "some sense of the poetry of modern life".
In fact there are many precedents for poets doubling up as crime writers. Cecil Day-Lewis is perhaps the best known.
He published his first detective novel in 1935, prompted by the need to raise funds to repair the roof of his cottage. As Nicholas Blake, Day-Lewis became one of England’s most popular and well-regarded detective novelists.
The series features the detective Nigel Strangeways, a thinly disguised WH Auden. Auden greatly approved of this fictional version of himself and of detective fiction in general; he said Day-Lewis’s novels had “given more pleasure to more people than, in our age, any verses can ever hope to”.
Alexander McCall Smith is best known for his million-selling detective stories, but a few years ago he dedicated his ample energies to write about his hero Auden. When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie – Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective and leading character in McCall Smith’s series – often refers to the great Auden.
"Crime writer scoops poetry prize" the headlines trumpeted when it was announced that David Harsent had won the Forward prize for best collection in 2005 for his book Legion. Harsent has carved a successful career writing crime fiction under the names Jack Curtis and David Lawrence, and he numbers episodes of Midsomer Murders among his many creations.
A Dublin bookshop source recently revealed that the poetry section is the most popular one for shoplifters, but it seems that some folk also believe in the crime-busting properties of poetry.
The writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir has a cartoon over her desk called Crimefighting with Spider-Man and Ginsberg. The cartoon shows Spider-Man running ahead of Allen Ginsberg and calling back to him: "I'll catch the crooks in my web, then you blow their minds with a poem." This set her to wondering what poem Ginsberg might recite once they had cornered the miscreants. She concludes that, naturally, it had to be Howl.
Although Yeats wrote no crime fiction that we know of, he is set to make an appearance in a series of fictional adventures featuring figures from Irish history. Written by the Tyrone writer Anthony Quinn, the first of these, The Blood Dimmed Tide, finds the poet on the trail of a murderer. Quinn suggests that "Yeats is kind of like a Sherlock Holmes of the supernatural." Maureen Kennelly is the director of Poetry Ireland
