Someone at the Young Ireland Society gave me a newspaper that I might read
some article or letter. I began idly reading verses describing the shore
of Ireland as seen by a returning, dying emigrant. My eyes filled with
tears and yet I knew the verses were badly written--vague, abstract words
such as one finds in a newspaper. I looked at the end and saw the name of
some political exile who had died but a few days after his return to
Ireland. They had moved me because they contained the actual thoughts of a
man at a passionate moment of life, and when I met my father I was full of
the discovery. We should write out our own thoughts in as nearly as
possible the language we thought them in, as though in a letter to an
intimate friend. We should not disguise them in any way; for our lives
give them force as the lives of people in plays give force to their words.
Personal utterance, which had almost ceased in English literature, could
be as fine an escape from rhetoric and abstraction as drama itself. My
father was indignant, almost violent, and would hear of nothing but drama.
"Personal utterance was only egotism." I knew it was not, but as yet did
not know how to explain the difference. I tried from that on to write out
of my emotions exactly as they came to me in life, not changing them to
make them more beautiful, and to rid my syntax of all inversions and my
vocabulary of literary words, and that made it hard to write at all. It
meant rejecting the words or the constructions that had been used over and
over because they flow most easily into rhyme and measure. Then, too, how
hard it was to be sincere, not to make the emotion more beautiful and more
violent or the circumstance more romantic. "If I can be sincere and make
my language natural, and without becoming discursive, like a novelist, and
so indiscreet and prosaic," I said to myself, "I shall, if good luck or
bad luck make my life interesting, be a great poet; for it will be no
longer a matter of literature at all." Yet when I re-read those early
poems which gave me so much trouble, I find little but romantic
convention, unconscious drama. It is so many years before one can believe
enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.