Yeats on Joyce

[Richard Fiero]

I rather like the following criticism which is 
attributed by Richard Ellman to Yeats writing in 
the 1926 A Vision about James Joyce in 
particular.‘There is hatred of the abstract . . . 
The intellect turns upon itself. . . . they 
either eliminate from metaphor the poet’s 
phantasy and substitute a strangeness discovered 
by historical or contemporary research or . . . 
break up the logical processes of thought by 
flooding them with associated ideas or words that 
seem to drift into the mind by chance; or . . . a 
lunatic among his keepers, a man fishing behind 
the gas works, the vulgarity of a single Dublin 
day prolonged through 700 pages – and delirium . 
. . It is as though myth and fact, united until 
the exhaustion of the Renaissance, have now 
fallen so far apart that man understands for the 
first time the rigidity of fact, and calls up, by that very recognition, myth.’