W.B. Yeats and Rollo May: Inspirational

[RonPrice]

"The greatness of a poem," wrote Rollo May in his analysis of creativity, "is not that it portrays the thing observed or experienced." It is, rather, he went on, that it portrays the poet's "vision cued off by his encounter with reality." No matter how many times I return to a theme, a topic, some aspect of my experience, no matter how much repetitious fragmentariness there appears in this poetry--and indeed on this website--a new poem or essay or any piece of writing arises with each product. A new vision is created each time. As Australian poet John Tranter put it: "You don't write a poem, you rewrite it dozens of times." Or as W.B. Yeats puts it with even greater force:

The friends that have it I do wrong
Whenever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake.1

1 W.B. Yeats, Collected Works in Verse and Prose, Vol.2, Epigraph, Stratford-on-Avon, 1908.