Yeats on Joyce

[Johnny Marr]

I bet Joyce would have liked it even more: a patrician Anglican writer
complaining about "the vulgarity of a single Dublin day", and who fails to
have picked up on Joyce's less spiritualist but equally firm melding of myth
and fact (and I type this as an acolyte of both WBY and JAAJ).

On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 4:36 AM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.’
>
>
>
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