I say this because I am ashamed to admit
that I had these ideas and that whenever I began to talk of them a
gloomy silence fell upon the room. A young Irish poet, who wrote
excellently but had the worst manners, was to say a few years
later, 'You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of
letters;' and if all the rhymers had not been polite, if most of
them had not been to Oxford or Cambridge, they would have said the
same thing. I was full of thought, often very abstract thought,
longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to
the art school instead of a university. Yet even if I had gone to
a university, and learned all the classical foundations of English
literature and English culture, all that great erudition which,
once accepted, frees the mind from restlessness, I should have had
to give up my Irish subject matter, or attempt to found a new
tradition. Lacking sufficient recognised precedent I must needs
find out some reason for all I did. I knew almost from the start
that to overflow with reasons was to be not quite well-born, and
when I could I hid them, as men hide a disagreeable ancestry; and
that there was no help for it, seeing that my country was not born
at all.
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