JOLLY DAYS

WB Yeats

The advocate of trance in the creation of art — of the expressiveness of art, W.B. Yeats:

I had set out on life with the thought of putting my very self into poetry…I thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle of my own mind and body….Then one day I understood quite suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its hand.