Discoveries: A Volume of Essays
1907
Yeats wrote these essays at the height of the Irish Literary Revival, when he and his contemporaries were reimagining what literature could be. Here, he attacks the anemia of modern drama, the timid realism that mistakes copying the world for understanding it. He argues that true art erupts from the collision between personality and intellect, between the body and the spirit. These are polemics dressed as philosophy: Yeats wants you to feel the pulse of things, not just observe them. He meditates on the poet's strange vocation in a commercial age, on why asceticism and the imagination are not opposites but secret partners. The essays move between the specific (a critique of contemporary theatre) and the eternal (what it means to make something beautiful in a world that often is not). Reading Yeats argue for art as visceral, bodily, necessary is to encounter a mind that believed beauty was a form of heroism.
