The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 8 (of 8): Discoveries. Edmund Spenser. Poetry and Tradition; and Other Essays. BibliographyYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
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The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 8 (of 8): Discoveries. Edmund Spenser. Poetry and Tradition; and Other Essays. Bibliography
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
English literature -- Irish authors
I give too, in a section which I call ‘Gardens of Delight,’ the good
gardens of Adonis and the bad gardens of Phædria and Acrasia, which
are mythological and symbolical, but not allegorical, and show,
more particularly those bad islands, his power of describing bodily
happiness and bodily beauty at its greatest. He seemed always to feel
through the eyes, imagining everything in pictures. Marlowe’s _Hero and
Leander_ is more energetic in its sensuality, more complicated in its
intellectual energy than this languid story, which pictures always a
happiness that would perish if the desire to which it offers so many
roses lost its indolence and its softness. There is no passion in the
pleasure he has set amid perilous seas, for he would have us understand
that there alone could the war-worn and the sea-worn man find date-less
leisure and unrepining peace.
_October, 1902._
POETRY AND TRADITION
I
WHEN Mr. O’Leary died I could not bring myself to go to his funeral,
though I had been once his close fellow-worker, for I shrank from
seeing about his grave so many whose Nationalism was different from
anything he had taught or that I could share. He belonged, as did his
friend John F. Taylor, to the romantic conception of Irish Nationality
on which Lionel Johnson and myself founded, so far as it was founded
on anything but literature, our Art and our Irish criticism. Perhaps
his spirit, if it can care for or can see old friends now, will accept
this apology for an absence that has troubled me. I learned much from
him and much from Taylor, who will always seem to me the greatest
orator I have heard; and that ideal Ireland, perhaps from this out an
imaginary Ireland, in whose service I labour, will always be in many
essentials their Ireland. They were the last to speak an understanding
of life and Nationality, built up by the generation of Grattan, which
read Homer and Virgil, and by the generation of Davis, which had been
pierced through by the idealism of Mazzini,[B] and of the European
revolutionists of the mid-century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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