Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a
buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous
gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is
centripetal in mind and body. And it is by such means that
Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry always does,
which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while
taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the
world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of
the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the
thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the
power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of
its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it,
the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of
values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in
so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.
buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous
gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is
centripetal in mind and body. And it is by such means that
Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry always does,
which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while
taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the
world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of
the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the
thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the
power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of
its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it,
the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of
values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in
so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.
Seamus Heaney