Vintage commentary …

… Yeats revisited by C.H. Sisson - The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… at the age of seventeen I had encountered the work of Eliot, and shortly afterward that of Pound, and all that had immediately preceded them was swept away. It was only after this radical re-education, and indeed after indoctrination by New Verse, that I came to the Collected Poems of Yeats—well instructed enough, therefore, to know that I should start reading from The Winding Stair and The Tower. I looked once or twice without effect, and then the magic began. However fashionable my theoretical literary dogmatisms may have been at the time, the poems worked. The clarity and the emphasis of the language were such that the words went home to my memory, and what used to be called the heart, so that I have never since been able to return to Yeats without being threatened by a recrudescence—at times sharply resisted—of that early enthusiasm. The impressions of youth are indelible, and when I open the book now the words rise less from the page than from within me.