Explore "Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of its Own" by W.B. Yeats on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In watching a play about modern educated people with its meagre language / and its action crushed into the narrow limits of possibility I have / found myself constantly saying: 'Maybe it has its power to move, slight / as that is, from being able to suggest fundamental contrasts and / passions which romantic and poetical literature have shown to be / beautiful. ' A man facing his enemies alone in a quarrel over the purity / of the water in a Norwegian Spa and using no language but that of the / newspapers can call up into our minds, let us say, the passion of / Coriolanus. The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are / more vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one's own ruling / passion that is itself riddled by their thought as by lightning, and / even two dumb figures on the roads can call up all that glory. Put the / man who has no knowledge of literature before a play of this kind and he / will say as he has said in some form or other in every age at the first / shock of naturalism, 'What has brought me out to hear nothing but the / words we use at home when we are talking of the rates? ' And he will / prefer to it any play where there is visible beauty or mirth, where life / is exciting, at high tide as it were. It is not his fault that he will / prefer in all likelihood a worse play although its kind may be greater, / for we have been following the lure of science for generations and / forgotten him and his. I come always back to this thought. There is / something of an old wives' tale in fine literature. The makers of it are / like an old peasant telling stories of the great famine or the hangings / of '98 or his own memories. He has felt something in the depth of his / mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as / possible.
He will use the most extravagant words or illustrations if / they suit his purpose. Or he will invent a wild parable and the more his / mind is on fire or the more creative it is the less will he look at the / outer world or value it for its own sake. It gives him metaphors and / examples and that is all. He is even a little scornful of it, for it / seems to him while the fit is on that the fire has gone out of it and / left it but white ashes. I cannot explain it, but I am certain that / every high thing was invented in this way, between sleeping and waking, / as it were, and that peering and peeping persons are but hawkers of / stolen goods. How else could their noses have grown so ravenous or their / eyes so sharp?