PL Travers, on bringing WB Yeats a bundle of rowan branches from his Lake of Innisfree, in a 1967 is
PL Travers, on bringing WB Yeats a bundle of rowan branches from his Lake of Innisfree, in a 1967 issue of The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress:“[Yeats] was always the bard, always filling the role of poet, not play acting but knowing well the role’s requirements and giving them their due. He never came into a room, he entered it; walking around his study was a ceremonial peregrination, wonderful to witness. "When I get an idea for a poem,” he went on, oracularly, “I take down one of my own books and read it and then I go on from there.” Moses explaining his tablets couldn’t have moved me more. And so, serenely, we came to the end of the pilgrimage and I was just about to bid him good-bye when I noticed on his desk a vase of water and in it one sprig of fruiting rowan. I glanced at him distrustfully. “Was he teaching me a lesson?” I wondered, for at that age one cannot accept to be taught. But he wasn’t; I knew it by the look on his face. He would do nothing so banal. He was not trying to enlighten me and so I was enlightened and found a connection in the process. It needed only a sprig, said the lesson. And I learned, also, something about writing. The secret is to say less than you need. You don’t want a forest, a leaf will do.“Only a leaf will do. -- source link
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