"' Elaborate
modern psychology sounds egotistical, I thought, when it speaks in
the first person, but not those simple emotions which resemble the
more, the more powerful they are, everybody's emotion, and I was
soon to write many poems where an always personal emotion was woven
into a general pattern of myth and symbol. When the Fenian poet says
that his heart has grown cold and callous, 'For thy hapless fate,
dear Ireland, and sorrows of my own,' he but follows tradition, and
if he does not move us deeply, it is because he has no sensuous
musical vocabulary that comes at need, without compelling him to
sedentary toil and so driving him out from his fellows. I thought to
create that sensuous, musical vocabulary, and not for myself only
but that I might leave it to later Irish poets, much as a mediaeval
Japanese painter left his style as an inheritance to his family, and
was careful to use a traditional manner and matter; yet did
something altogether different, changed by that toil, impelled by my
share in Cain's curse, by all that sterile modern complication, by
my 'originality' as the newspapers call it.
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