Months before his death in 1939, W. B.
Yeats found himself at a crisis point. He was writing many poems; at the
same time, he was afraid that he had become a kind of fraud, an
impostor, lifelessly trotting out his old themes because he had nothing
new to say. “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,” he wrote in
“The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” the penultimate poem in his great 1939
collection, Last Poems. “What can I but enumerate old themes?”
he mused. The title suggested that his inspiration had fled him, like
the departure of a carnival’s acts; his circus animals, if he could find
them at all, refused to perform anything satisfactory or fresh, and the
circus itself had dimmed, like the eyes of someone who has forgotten
how to dream.
Yeats had come to an impasse as a writer. In simpler terms, he was
having writer’s block and doubting his abilities, though it was
magnified by his being in his seventies and his awareness that his
health was failing, that he, like those circus animals, did not have
long left on the stage. In the famous, stark final stanza of the poem,
he suggested that he needed to find that fey spark, that spool of dream,
he once knew so well, even if it meant going back to the
beginning—whatever and wherever that might be. “Now that my ladder’s
gone,” he said, “I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the
foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/when-even-the-greatest-of-writers-grapples-with-self-doubt/
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