MONDAY, 7 JUNE, 2004
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Poem: "I'll Be Seeing You," by Jo McDougall, from Towns Facing Railroads. © University of Arkansas Press. Reprinted with permission.
I'll Be Seeing You
World War II is slipping away, I can feel it.
Its officers are gray.
Their wives who danced at the USO
are gray, too.
Veterans forget their stories. Some lands they fought in
have new names, and Linda Venetti
who deserted the husband who raised cows
to run off with an officer
has come home to look after her mother
and work the McDonald's morning shift.
William Holden is dead,
and my mother, who knew all the words
to "When the Lights Go On Again All over the World."
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, born in Topeka, Kansas (1917). She's the author of the collections A Street in Bronzeville (1945), The Bean Eaters (1960) and In the Mecca (1968). In 1949 she became the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize, for her collection Annie Allen.It's the birthday of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, born in Topeka, Kansas (1917). She's the author of the collections A Street in Bronzeville (1945), The Bean Eaters (1960) and In the Mecca (1968). In 1949 she became the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize, for her collection Annie Allen.
It's the birthday of novelist Elizabeth Bowen, born in Dublin, Ireland (1899). She's known for writing about British upper-class society in novels such as The Death of the Heart (1938) and A World of Love (1955).
Bowen said, "The genius of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental: it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust."
She wrote in a letter to the writer V.S. Pritchett, "Solitary ... people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether house-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers."
It's the birthday of poet and novelist Louise Erdrich, born in Little Falls, Minnesota (1954). She's best known for her series of four books that follow three generations of Chippewa Indians in North Dakota during the twentieth century: Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988) and The Bingo Palace (1994).
She grew up on the plains of North Dakota. Her father was of German descent and her mother was a Chippewa Indian. They encouraged her writing right from the beginning: Her father gave her a nickel for every story she wrote, and her mother wove together strips of construction paper to make book covers for them. Erdrich later said, "At an early age, I felt myself to be a published author earning substantial royalties."
Her newest novel, The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) just came out in paperback. It begins: "Fidelis walked home from the great war in twelve days and slept thirty-eight hours once he crawled into his childhood bed. When he woke in Germany in late November of the year 1918, he was only a few centimeters away from becoming French on Clemenceau and Wilson's redrawn map, a fact that mattered nothing compared to what there might be to eat."
It's the birthday of novelist Harry Crews, born in Bacon County, Georgia (1935). He's the author of many novels, including The Gypsy's Curse (1977), Body (1990) and Celebration (1997).
He grew up on a series of farms in one of the poorest parts of Georgia. He said the only reason he knew that there was a world outside of rural Georgia was through books. When he was 17 he volunteered for the Marines. He went off to fight in Korea, and it was there that he got his real education, reading whatever books he could get his hands on. He later said, "When I got to my first duty station and walked into the base library, it was like throwing a starving man a turkey. I did my time in the Corps with a book always at hand."
When he got back from Korea, he went to the University of Florida on the G.I. Bill, but he dropped out after two years to drive around the country on his motorcycle. He later said, "Choking and gasping from Truth and Beauty, I gave up on school for a Triumph motorcycle." During his road trip, he worked as a bartender, a cook, and a caller at a carnival sideshow. He also began writing, but it wasn't until 1968 that his first book, The Gospel Singer, was published.
Crews said, "Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design."
And he said, "Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about .... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them."
TUESDAY, JUNE 8, 2004
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Poem: "After an Absence," by Linda Pastan, from The Imperfect Paradise. © W.W. Norton and Co. Reprinted with permission.
After an Absence
After an absence that was no one's fault
we are shy with each other,
and our words seem younger than we are,
as if we must return to the time we met
and work ourselves back to the present,
the way you never read a story
from the place you stopped
but always start each book all over again.
Perhaps we should have stayed
tied like mountain climbers
by the safe cord of the phone,
its dial our own small prayer wheel,
our voices less ghostly across the miles,
less awkward than they are now.
I had forgotten the grey in your curls,
that splash of winter over your face,
remembering the younger man
you used to be.
And I feel myself turn old and ordinary,
having to think again of food for supper,
the animals to be tended, the whole riptide
of daily life hidden but perilous
pulling both of us under so fast.
I have dreamed of our bed
as if it were a shore where we would be washed up,
not this striped mattress
we must cover with sheets. I had forgotten
all the old business between us,
like mail unanswered so long that silence
becomes eloquent, a message of its own.
I had even forgotten how married love
is a territory more mysterious
the more it is explored, like one of those terrains
you read about, a garden in the desert
where you stoop to drink, never knowing
if your mouth will fill with water or sand.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1867 that Mark Twain set off on a tour of Europe and the Middle East, a trip that gave him the material for his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). He traveled with a large group of American tourists, on a steam-driven side-wheeler called the Quaker City. It was the first transatlantic cruise on a steamship.
Twain was just starting out as a writer at the time. He was living in New York, working as the travel correspondent for the San Francisco newspaper the Alta California. He convinced the editors to pay for his cruise, and in exchange he would write 50 letters from the cruise ship to be published in the paper. He had just started using the name Mark Twain a few years ago, and he was still trying to build his reputation. His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), hadn't sold very well, and he thought a travel book would be a good way to make a name for himself.
Travel narratives were growing very popular at the time, but Twain didn't want to write a conventional travel book. He hated how travel books made it seem like every church and every museum was worth visiting. He wanted to write a book about what it was actually like to travel—with all of the inconveniences and disappointments and fatigue. He said the purpose of the book was "to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him."
In Florence, he wrote, "It is popular to admire the Arno. It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water into it. They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines. They even help out the delusion by building bridges over it. I do not see why they are too good to wade."
When Twain got back from the cruise, his publisher gave him six months to write a 600-page book, even though he still had to make a living by writing newspaper articles. He wrote most of it in Washington, D.C., in a tiny room full of dirty clothes, cigar ashes and manuscript pages. He used a lot of the material from the letters he wrote during the trip, but he made several changes to make it more appealing to an eastern audience. He took out some of the cruder jokes and the racier passages, such as a description of nude bathers at Odessa. He thought easterners were more likely to be offended than westerners, and he wanted to reach as large an audience as possible. And he didn't use as much slang, because most easterners would have no idea what it meant. He wrote about 200,000 words in two months, or about 3,500 words per day, and finished just before his publisher's deadline. The Innocents Abroad sold more than 125,000 copies in ten years, and it established Twain's reputation.
WEDNESDAY, 9 JUNE, 2004
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Poem: selections from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," by William Wordsworth.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
I
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
II
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
III
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief ...
IV
Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
--But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
V
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
....
X
Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song!
And let the young Lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound!
We in thought will join your throng,
Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts today
Feel the gladness of the May!
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
XI
... I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
THURSDAY, 10 JUNE, 2004
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Poems: "June 10," by David Lehman, from The Evening Sun. © Scribner. Reprinted with permission.
"Cabbage Moths," by Charles Goodrich, from Insects of South Corvallis. © Cloudbank Books. Reprinted with permission.
June 10
The sun like whiskey and caffeine
goes right to your head
slowing you down then speeding you up
you spend one hour looking at three
hanging plants and ten minutes
reading the obits lamenting the man
(I knew him, we had Irish Coffee
one cold December night)
who had the ill fortune to die
on a day when somebody really famous
like the leader of a rock band
died and so his obituary was overlooked
and I am thinking of him today
I'd tip my cap to him if I were wearing one
but I'm not I'm standing here
unprotected in the sun
that has gone to my head like a song
Cabbage Moths
To mate on the wing,
now that's a trick I want to learn—
hopped up on pheromones,
legs twitching,
wings flapping impossibly fast ....
For that I'd take a spin
as an insignificant lepidoterid.
For that I'd give up
all my nature programs,
rock music, erotic poetry.
I'd even do
penance in the egg.
I'd crawl through adolescence on my belly
eating none of the food I love, eating nothing
but cabbage, cabbage, cabbage.
For that instant
of sudden weightlessness,
fluttering with my beloved on the verge
of a holy convulsion
I await my turn.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of fiction writer James Salter, born James Horowitz in New York City (1925). His novels include The Hunters (1956) and The Arm of Flesh (1961). He tried writing Hollywood screenplays in the 1960s, but he didn't like it and went back to writing novels. He said, "A film writer is very much like a party girl. While you're good-looking and still unlined, the possibilities seem endless. But your appeal doesn't last long and you're quickly discarded."
It's the birthday of children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, born in Brooklyn, New York (1928). He's best known as the author of the children's classic Where the Wild Things Are (1964).
It's the birthday of playwright Terence Rattigan, born in London (1911). He's the author of many plays, including French Without Tears (1936), Flare Path (1942) and The Winslow Boy (1946).
It's the birthday of novelist Saul Bellow, born in Lachine, Quebec, Canada (1915).
He's been publishing fiction for over fifty years; he's written over 30 books, and he's published at least one novel each decade since the 1940s. His novels include The Adventures of Augie March (1954), Humboldt's Gift (1975) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970).
His first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947), sold fewer than 5,000 copies combined. He spent most of 1948 in France with his wife, hoping to gather material for a novel. But he grew depressed after a few months: His novel was going nowhere, he wasn't getting along with the French, and the weather was dreary. He decided to start writing a new novel, about a young man's adventures in Chicago just before the Great Depression. That novel became The Adventures of Augie March, and it was his first big success. The British writer Martin Amis recently called it "the Great American Novel" for its "fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity .... Everything is in here."
Last year, The Library of America published Bellow's first three novels in a volume called Novels, 1944-53, making him the first living author to be published by Library of America.
Bellow said, "There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book."
FRIDAY, 11 JUNE, 2004
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Poem: "Cosmetics Do No Good," by Steve Kowit, from Passionate Journey. © City Miner Books. Reprinted with permission.
Cosmetics Do No Good
Cosmetics do no good:
no shadow, rouge, mascara, lipstick—
nothing helps.
However artfully I comb my hair,
embellishing my throat & wrists with jewels,
it is no use—there is no
semblance of the beautiful young girl
I was
& long for still.
My loveliness is past.
& no one could be more aware than I am
that coquettishness at this age
only renders me ridiculous.
I know it. Nonetheless,
I primp myself before the glass
like an infatuated schoolgirl
fussing over every detail,
practicing whatever subtlety
may please him.
I cannot help myself.
The God of Passion has his will of me
& I am tossed about
between humiliation & desire,
rectitude & lust,
disintegration & renewal,
ruin & salvation.
after Vidyapati
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of poet and playwright Ben Jonson, born in London (1572). He didn't want to be a bricklayer like his father, so he got a job as an actor and then began to write plays. He had a notoriously bad temper, and once killed another actor in a dual. He was put on trial, but right around the same time, his first important play, Every Man in His Humour (1598), premiered, with William Shakespeare as one of the actors. Even though he was a convicted felon, and spent time in prison, his work was popular enough for him to become a court poet.
It's the birthday of William Styron, born in Newport News, Virginia (1925). He enlisted in the Marines as a teenager, to fight in World War II, but by the time he'd finished training and set sail for Japan, the war had ended. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, and got a job as an office boy at the McGraw-Hill publishing house. He was supposed to write book jacket copy, but he was so disgusted with most of the books that he filled all his summaries with insults and foul language. After throwing several paper airplanes and water balloons out the window of his office, he got fired. So he decided to try to make it as a writer.
Styron had always wanted to be a writer, but, he said, "At twenty-two ... I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast." His first idea was to write a novel about slavery. It amazed him that his grandmother could remember when her family owned slaves, and he was always fascinated by the story of the slave uprising led by Nat Turner. But when he told a creative writing teacher about his idea, the teacher said he should wait until he had written a few novels before he tackled something so ambitious.
Then, he learned that a girl he'd once dated had committed suicide. He took a train to her funeral, and on the journey back to his hometown a novel took shape in his head about a girl's suicide and its effect on her family and community. That novel was Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and it got great reviews. He wrote two more novels before he went back to his first idea, and in 1967 he published The Confessions of Nat Turner, which became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His most recent book is A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993).
It's the birthday of critic Irving Howe, born in the East Bronx, New York (1920). He's the author of many books of essays and criticism, but he's perhaps best known for his book World of Our Fathers (1976) about the history of Eastern European immigration to the United States.
It's the birthday of poet David Lehman, born in New York City (1948). He's the author of several books of poetry, including An Alternative to Speech (1986) and Operation Memory (1990). He started out writing poems in the style of his favorite New York poets, including Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery, a group known as the New York School. He has even written a book about those poets called The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998).
In 1995, Lehman went to a poetry reading by the poet Robert Bly, where Bly announced that he had been writing a poem a day every day before he got out of bed in the morning. Lehman liked the idea so he decided to try it himself, beginning in January 1996. He found that he loved being so productive. He said, "At one point, I wrote one of these a day for 140 days without a pause, and in that period I would wake up and look forward to the day and the composition of its poems. There was a buoyancy I'm not sure I ever had before. It was like finding out that I could write as easily as I speak." He published his daily poems in the collections The Daily Mirror (2000) and The Evening Sun (2002).
SATURDAY, 12 JUNE, 2004
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Poem: "Atwater Kent," by William Stafford, from The Way it Is. © Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.
Atwater Kent
Late nights the world flooded our dark house
in a dim throbbing from a glowing little box, velvety
sound hovering from horns, or Cab Calloway
far in a night club stretched all the way to Kansas.
Maybe rewarded with popcorn or fudge, maybe
just exhausted by the day, we sprawled on the living room
rug and were carried above our house, out
over town, and spread thin by a violin.
Once from Chicago Enio Belognini
civilized with his cello a whole
hemisphere, and we were transformed into Italians
or other great people, listening in palaces.
Rich in our darkness, we lay inheriting
rivers of swirling millions, and the promise of never
a war again. It all came from the sky,
Heaven: London, Rome, Copenhagen.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of Djuna Barnes, born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York (1892). She started out as a reporter for a variety of different magazines, including Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and she often contributed illustrations for her own articles. She was part of the bohemian scene in Greenwich Village, and published a collection of poems and drawings in 1915 called The Book of Repulsive Women.
She went off to Paris in 1920 and became friends with writers there, including T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. After reading Joyce's novel Ulysses in 1922, she said, "I shall never write another line. Who has the nerve to after that?" But almost 15 years later, she published Nightwood (1936), an experimental novel about a woman named Nora Flood, her love affairs and her spiritual advisor, a transvestite named Dr. O'Conner.
The book was rejected by all the American publishers she submitted it to, but T.S. Eliot loved it, so he published it himself and wrote an introduction. It had a great influence on many later experimental writers of the 1950s and '60s, and it's become a cult favorite.
It's the birthday of Anne Frank, born in Frankfurt, Germany (1929). She received a diary as a birthday present on her thirteenth birthday in 1942, and she immediately began writing in it. At that time, she was living with her family in Amsterdam, where they had moved to get away from the Nazis—but the Nazis had followed them. Since 1940, Anne had been living under Nazi occupation, but she was still living a fairly ordinary life. Her earliest journal entries are about her grades and her classmates and the boys that she knew.
In one early entry she wrote that since she did not have any close friends, she would treat her diary as though it were a close friend, and she began addressing it by the imaginary name of "Kitty." She wrote, "I hope I shall be able to confide in you completely, as I have never been able to do in anyone before, and I hope that you will be a great support and comfort to me." Less than one month after writing those words, the Nazis began deporting Jews to concentration camps, and Anne and her family went into hiding in an attic above a store, where they lived for the next two years.
Frank wrote in her diary regularly while she was in hiding, but she didn't just write about the Nazi persecution or the experience of living in secret; she also wrote about the ordinary details of her adolescent life. She wrote about how much she hated potatoes and how her older sister was clearly her parents' favorite. She described the jokes people made, and her brief romance with Peter, the son of the other family living in the attic.
More than anything, she wrote about her struggle to be an individual despite her lack of privacy. She wrote, "Everyone thinks I'm showing off when I talk, ridiculous when I'm silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lazy when I'm tired, selfish when I eat one bit more than I should, stupid, cowardly, calculating .... I really am trying to be helpful, friendly, and good, and to do everything I can so that the rain of rebukes dies down to a light summer drizzle."
In 1944, she heard on the radio that people should hang onto their war letters and diaries because they would be historical documents someday. After that she started thinking about trying to publish her diary, but she also thought about turning it into a novel.
On August 4, 1944, the annex was raided by Nazi police, and Anne and her family were among the last Jews shipped out of the Netherlands to concentration camps. Anne died of typhus in Belsen-Belsen six weeks before the camp was liberated by the Allies.
Her father was the only member of family who survived. He traveled back to Amsterdam to find that his secretary had saved Anne's diary. He took several weeks to read it, because he could only bear to read a little bit at a time without breaking down. He made copies for family members, and it was a Dutch university professor who read the diary and urged Otto Frank to publish it.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl first came out in 1947, and it was an immediate bestseller. It was translated into more than 50 languages. The entire first printing of the English translation sold out the day after it was reviewed in the New York Times. It was made into a play and then a movie, and it became the standard book used in schools for introducing children to the idea of the Holocaust. It has now sold more than 25 million copies.
SUNDAY, 13 JUNE, 2004
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Poem: Poem: "When You Are Old," by William Butler Yeats, from Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats.
When You Are Old
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of writer and teacher Mark Van Doren, born in Hope, Illinois (1894). Though in his lifetime he was a published poet and critic, and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, he was perhaps best known as a professor of literature at Columbia University, where he taught many students who would go on to become important American writers.
He started teaching at Columbia in 1920. At a time when most teachers delivered long lectures, Van Doren led class discussions as though they were casual conversations. He spoke slowly, to give his students time to think, and he often gripped the lectern with his rough hands. His students included John Berryman, Clifton Fadiman, Thomas Merton, Lionel Trilling, Louis Simpson and Jack Kerouac.
Van Doren said of his teaching style, "My purpose was to examine the ways in which the greatest tellers had put divine things and human things together. The ultimate dimension, I suggested, was given to narrative by the presence in it of gods or their equivalent."
It's the birthday of poet and playwright William Butler Yeats, born in Dublin, Ireland (1865). He was a poet who lived during great political and social changes in his home country, but he spent much of his life obsessed not with politics but with mysticism. His aunt gave him a popular book of the era called Esoteric Buddhism (1884), about Eastern mystical philosophy, and Yeats especially loved its idea that the world of matter was an illusion. When he was twenty, he and a group of friends formed the Dublin Hermetic Society, in order to conduct experiments into the nature of ghosts and psychic powers. His father, who had wanted him to be a scientist, scolded him for believing in all that mystical nonsense. Yeats told his father that mysticism, next to poetry, was the most important pursuit of his life.
He got involved in the London Theosophical Society in 1887 and later joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, a group that performed a variety of ancient magic rituals. He attended séances and tarot card readings. Seeing the performances of mediums and learning about reincarnation inspired him to study Celtic myths and folklore, which greatly influenced his poetry.
In 1889, he met Maud Gonne, a beautiful actress who had become an activist and who spoke out for Irish nationalism and independence. She became the love of his life, and though she refused his proposal of marriage, she believed that they were spiritually married, that they could communicate telepathically, and that they had been brother and sister in a past life. She helped him gather folklore from the peasants, and to learn about ancient Celtic culture. Yeats came to believe that if he could get in touch with the deep, mythic history of the Irish people, he could pull the country together with the power of poetry.
Yeats spent years writing plays about Irish nationalism for Maud Gonne to star in. But by 1910, Maud Gonne had married someone else and Yeats had given up on trying to win her love. He published the collection The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910), which was his first work of poetry that didn't make any references to fairylands or magic. He wrote, "Though leaves are many, the root is one; / Through all the lying days of my youth / I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; / Now I may wither into the truth."
He continued to consult with mediums and to experiment with automatic writing and séances for the rest of his life, but he gave up on the idea of writing poetry for the collective soul of Ireland, and wrote instead for himself. He said, "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." Many critics consider his greatest poems those that he wrote after he gave up on Irish Nationalism, collected in books such as The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933).
Yeats wrote, "Now that my ladder's gone / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."
