ABSTRACT
In one of his last letters Yeats wrote, “I am happy, and I think full of an energy, an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put it all into a phrase I say, ‘Man can embody truth but he cannot know it’ … The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel, but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence …” This is not essentially different from what he might have said as a young man editing Blake. The loathed abstraction was then associated with other names; a new 60‘system’ takes the place of that so carefully studied in the Blake edition, but the quest is the same. How is truth embodied? What concretion, in poetry, takes the place that refutable abstraction occupies in philosophy and other merely intellectual disciplines?
