News at Eleven: I think that Yeats is a rhetorician of genius:

I just don't think he ever had a quarrel with himself. That is why the letters are so boring. And when Yeats revises his poems, he succeeds only in making them more sonorous.

Take the lines: "Now that my ladder's gone,/I must lie down where all the ladders start,/In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." What is "foul" doing here?

from New Statesman: The Books Interview: Christopher Ricks

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