"Is poetry cheap thrills, then, mere amazement, dream states, rhapsodies, and trances, ecstasy for its own sake, something to gape at, a medium for bringing on goose bumps, shivers, the jimjams? (Is revelation?)
Yeats answers: No. The wish that he made so often in his poems, as he figuratively blew out the candles, year by year, herein comes true—that he stay aroused, that the fury intensify rather than wane, that he keep faith with his poetry's ecstasy and "its bitter furies of complexity" until his death. And that his poetry prove that intellectual ecstasy, in dragging its language through the fury and mire of existence, engenders meaning."
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