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| The poet W.B. Yeats, photographed by Alice Boughton, 1903. |
Last night, reading Cleanth Brooks' book of critical essays, A Shaping Joy (1971), I became intrigued by this quotation from W.B. Yeats' 'Anima Hominis' (in Per Amica Silentia Lunae): 'no fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson ... were dissipated men ... and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out and were awakening from the dream ... Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self ... comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.'
Every time I attempt to articulate why I enjoy this description and find it important, I fumble it. So I'll just put it out there, for others to read if they wish, and perhaps some clearer thoughts will arrive in time.
Though I have a suspicion Yeats might have found it relatively easy to meet poets today who are 'sentimentalists'. Unfortunately.
