Synge and the Ireland of his Time by W.B. Yeats

I attack things that are as dear to many as some holy image carried / hither and thither by some broken clan, and can but say that I have / felt in my body the affections I disturb, and believed that if I could / raise them into contemplation I would make possible a literature, that / finding its subject-matter all ready in men's minds would be, not as / ours is, an interest for scholars, but the possession of a people. I / have founded societies with this aim, and was indeed founding one in / Paris when I first met with J. M. Synge, and I have known what it is to / be changed by that I would have changed, till I became argumentative / and unmannerly, hating men even in daily life for their opinions. And / though I was never convinced that the anatomies of last year's leaves / are a living forest, or thought a continual apologetic could do other / than make the soul a vapour and the body a stone; or believed that / literature can be made by anything but by what is still blind and dumb / within ourselves, I have had to learn how hard in one who lives where / forms of expression and habits of thought have been born, not for the / pleasure of begetting but for the public good, is that purification / from insincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery / of style. But it became possible to live when I had learnt all I had / not learnt in shaping words, in defending Synge against his enemies, / and knew that rich energies, fine, turbulent or gracious thoughts, / whether in life or letters, are but love-children.