essential things

Yeats saw the things of this world differently; he was an essentialist. In the men and the women he knew—both those he loved and those he hated—as well as in swans, hares, swords, and towers, he spied some changeless and irreducible essence. He was a Realist in the medieval sense. He believed that universals are real, that those abstract terms by which we categorize entities—Man or Woman, Beauty or Liberty, Swan or Goose—possess the fullest measure of genuine existence in sone suprasensual realm, and that the earthly embodiments of these transcendent archetypes are but momentary instantiations.

—Eric Ormsby, “Passionate Syntax,” Fine Incisions: Essays on Poetry and Place (The Porcupine Quill, 2011)

unrefuted song

I am happy, and I think full of an energy, of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say: 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it'. I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.

—W. B. Yeats, in letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham three weeks before his death.

song and charge

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made...

—W.B. Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben"

how does a poem mean

For WHAT DOES THE POEM MEAN? is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry. A more useful way of asking the question is HOW DOES A POEM MEAN? Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning? As Yeats wrote:

        body swayed to music, O quickening glance,
        How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?

What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself.

—John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Houghton Mifflin, 1960)

reading verse

It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.

—W. B. Yeats, introducing his poems in a 1932 recording, Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006 (Shout! Factory, 2006)