The whole man

«True poetry, Yeats would declare, had to be the speech of the whole man. It was not sufficient that it be the artful expression of daylight opinion and conviction; it had to emerge from a more profound consciousness and be, in the words of his friend Arthur Symons, the voice of 'the mistery which lies about us, out of which we have come and into which we shall return'»

Seamus Heaney
W. B. Yeats, poems selected by Seamus Heaney
Faber and Faber, 2000