How Callous, Yeats

Complaining of those who yearn for luxury when you yourself already revel quietly in them. As though such desires properly preclude a man from more developed sentiments. Frankly, they may at times distract him from the fullest use of his finer sentiment. But the mere presence of these passions is no justification for dismissing the whole.

It will take a really good poem from Yeats to reconcile me again to the man who scorned the low-born poet John Keats with these words: “I see a schoolboy when I think of him, / With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window,” a boy “poor, ailing and ignorant, / Shut out from all the luxury of the world, / The coarse-bred son of a livery-stable keeper.”