It Is Always Hard For

Anyone Who Has Read Yeats's Wonderful Autobiography Will Remember His Sligo Shabby, Shadowed, Half Country And Half Sea, Full Of Confused Romance, Superstition, Poverty, Eccentricity, Unrecognized Anachronism, Passion And Ignorance And The Little Boy's Misery. Yeats Was Treated Well But Was Bitterly Unhappy; He Prayed That He Would Die, And Used Often To Say To Himself: "when You Are Grown Up, Never Talk As Grown-up People Do Of The Happiness Of Childhood.

When You Begin To Read A Poem You Are Entering A Foreign Country Whose Laws And Language And Life Are A Kind Of Translation Of Your Own; But To Accept It Because Its Stews Taste Exactly Like Your Old Mother's Hash, Or To Reject It Because The Owl-headed Goddess Of Wisdom In Its Temple Is Fatter Than The Statue Of Liberty, Is An Equal Mark Of That Want Of Imagination, That Inaccessibility To Experience, Of Which Each Of Us Who Dies A Natural Death Will Die.

Most Of The People In A War Never Fight For Even A Minute Though They Bear For Years And Die Forever. They Do Not Fight, But Only Starve, Only Suffer, Only Die: The Sum Of All This Passive Misery Is That Great Activity, War.

The Usual Criticism Of A Novel About An Artist Is That, No Matter How Real He Is As A Man, He Is Not Real To Us As An Artist, Since We Have To Take On Trust The Works Of Art He Produces.

The Climate Of Our Culture Is Changing. Under These New Rains, New Suns, Small Things Grow Great, And What Was Great Grows Small; Whole Species Disappear And Are Replaced.