Literature Network » William Butler Yeats

The Locust Song

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From: Poetry
Date: 20050701
Author:Goldbarth, Albert

...the wise and wry observation which the young William Butler Yeats offered one evening in The Cheshire Cheese to his fellow young poets in the Rhymers Club: "None of us can say who will succeed, or even who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are too many.

-Paul Carroll

The tyranny of poets: "Like." O we were like

the infinite regression of roe, in the sex crease

of a sturgeon. We were like - what? like, as numerous

as the stars, the grains of sand, the uses of "like" itself.

Too many of us. Too flakes of snow, too fish

in the deep, too waterbugs of Florida. In ...

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