[Michael F]

Andrew M -- yes, that is well put. I don’t get the sense that Yeats endorses some kind of aesthetic quietism as ‘the answer’.

IMHO, art is not art that does not stir the emotions. I think there is a hierarchy of emotions, and the better or nobler the emotions, the more they want, even demand, to be shared, to be realized outside the imagination, and not walled inside like a barren, landlocked sea. How to realize these emotions in ‘the mire of existence’: ah, that is the question...

(Gratuitous, off-topic aside, which I reserve the right to delete: one reason that I dislike some of Stevens’s work is that I judge it too intellectual: detached and emotionally sterile. Jarrell fabulously called this quality in some of Stevens's work ‘G.E. Moore at the spinet.’ There are better examples of this than the poem referenced above, but I think the criticism holds for that poem.)