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... do they fling White wing out beside white wing? What can a swan need but a swan? God has not appeared to the birds.... In my opinion, this, though not Yeats at his most Celtic, is poetry of a marvellous beauty - extremely suggestive, moving and musical. To get into the spirit of its vision and word and vibration is to enter a rare world of revealing intensity and, if one is a... poem began. That is the first thing to understand about art. If people want to measure one's outer life entirely by one's poetry and vice versa, they are going the wrong way about a most delicate business. It is their fault and not the poet's or his poetry's. Great poetry does not pose: the simple reason is that it is truly inspired. In art, mere intellectual ingenuity, mere rhetoric, mere artifice... and unlike you, is intoxicated with Yeats - and rightly so. Yet to make Yeats the touchstone of poetry is misguiding; for the Page 11 spell-binding art of subtly rich incantation is one of the rare modes of poetry and does not comprise all the poetic modes. We might as well judge poetry by Sri Aurobindo's "overhead" tones: these tones make a still rarer mode and if we set up the u ...