Michael Carson at The Hudson Review:
Valéry said we see only through effort after we see for the first time. This is its own sort of trauma. We repeat the seashore of our youth until we die. Yeats did too, with his Irish myths and hopeless love for Maud, his Symbolist trappings and occult obsessions, and all the insecurities of the accomplished autodidact (he once failed to get a teaching job at Trinity College because he couldn’t spell “professor”), but there is a point when we realize art can take us further: It can let us see everything. It is the effort that changes utterly. Owen grasped this as well as Yeats.
So, today, now, thinking this through, weighing it, what do we do with this violence? Do we carry it with us like a secret heart? Do we make it into myth so as to share the secret? “All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong,” says Yeats in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Some men have eyes that glitter and some go dull to survive.
more here.
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