The humanity of speech …

… Denis Donoghue: Why WB Yeats matters. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

So Yeats has been intuiting the life common to all forms of it and bringing particular forms to the state of being intelligible. This is easy with landscape, because landscape has nothing to say for itself: if it seems to be eloquent, it is our eloquence. In The Wild Swans at Coole the streams are “companionable” not because they just are but because Yeats sees them as such, bringing them to that version of intelligibility.