Tortured

In one of his early poems William Butler Yeats memorably denounces those “old, learned, respectable bald heads” that “edit and annotate the lines that young men, tossing on their beds, rhymed out in love’s despair.” But if it weren’t for such boring old scholars, most of us would never have read that poem and perhaps never have heard of Yeats. Academics—the poor, slow unimaginative creatures—have always been an easy target, and Yeats was being as fatuous and unfair as...

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