Happy you poets who can be present and so present by a simple flicker of your genius, and not, like the clumsier race, have to lay a train and pile up faggots that may not after prove in the least combustible!
ATTRIBUTION:
Henry James (1843–1916), U.S. author. Letter, August 25, 1915, to poet W.B. Yeats, from private collection.
This passage was later incorporated into Yeats’s poem, “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory.”
