strange it is that artist and poet have never yet revealed themselves
to us except in verse and painting, that there was among them no
psychologist who could turn back upon himself to search for the law
of his own being, who could tell us how his brain first became
illuminated with images, and who tried to track the inspiration to
its secret fount and the images to their ancestral beauty. Few of
the psychologists who have written about imagination were endowed
with it themselves: and here is a poet, the most imaginative of
his generation, who has written about his youth and has told us
only about external circumstances and nothing about himself, nothing
about that flowering of strange beauty in poetry in him where the
Gaelic imagination that had sunk underground when the Gaelic speech
had died, rose up again transfiguring an alien language until that
new poetry became like the record of another mystic voyager to the
Heaven-world of our ancestors. But poet and artist are rarely self-
conscious of the processes of their own minds. They deliver their
message with exultation but they find nothing worth recording in
the descent upon them of the fiery tongues. So our poet has told
us little about himself but much about circumstance, and I recall
in his pages the Dublin of thirty years ago, and note how faithful
the memory of eye and ear are, and how forgetful the heart is of
its own fancies. Is nature behind this distaste for intimate self-
analysis in the poet? Are our own emanations poisonous to us if
we do not rapidly clear ourselves of them? Is it best to forget
ourselves and hurry away once the deed is done or the end is attained
to some remoter valley in the Golden World and look for a new beauty
if we would continue to create beauty?

I know how readily our poet forgets his own songs. I once quoted
to him some early verses of his own as comment on something he