Yes, my little point is twofold: first, the simple one that much - not to say most - great art is built in conversation with the past, and second, that auctoritates for one's plots and so forth were fundamental to art around much of the planet before say 1780. As I recall, educated Japanese men composed little poems in Chinese, to demonstrate taste, for a good part of the early modern period. For Europe, I refer the curious to E.R. Curtius's European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.
Yeats is an example of the former more than the latter, and I think a pretty good one. But we speak to an extent at cross purposes.
Cheers,
John
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