I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
You are not missing much
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/how-joyce-bit-the-yeats-hand-that-fed-him-31488044.html"One day, Joyce stopped Yeats in the street and introduced himself. Yeats had previously been warned about Joyce by George Russell, who wrote: "The first spectre of a new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce. I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer."
Yeats invited Joyce to a smoking room off O'Connell Street, where he endured one of the greatest put-downs in literary history. Yeats records that Joyce "began to explain all his objections to everything I had ever done; politics, folklore, historical settings of events and so on. Above all, why had I written about ideas? These things were all the signs of the cooling of the iron, of the fading out of inspiration. . . his own little book of poetry owed nothing to anything but his own mind which was much nearer to God than folklore".
Yeats was exasperated, puzzled and walked up and down expounding that all good art depended on popular tradition. He ended in triumph, as he thought, by referring to the art of Homer, and of Shakespeare and of Chartres Cathedral.
Joyce's reaction was to stand up to leave. As he was going out he asked Yeats, "How old are you?". Yeats said, "37". Joyce said, with a sigh, "I thought as much. I have met you too late. You are too old. I am 20". Despite this, Yeats reported, "A young poet who wrote excellently, but had the worst manners"."
The rabble aka youse
"No man, said the Nolan, can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude; and the artist, though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself. This radical principle of artistic economy applies specially to a time of crisis, and to-day when the highest form of art has been just preserved by desperate sacrifices, it is strange to see the artist making terms with the rabblement. The Irish Literary Theatre is the latest movement of protest against the sterility and falsehood of the modern stage. Half a century ago the note of protest was uttered in Norway, and since then in several countries long and disheartening battles have been fought against the hosts of prejudice and misinterpretation and ridicule. What triumph there has been here and there is due to stubborn conviction, and every movement that has set out heroically has achieved a little. The Irish Literary Theatre gave out that it was the champion of progress, and proclaimed war against commercialism and vulgarity. It had partly made good its word and was expelling the old devil when after the first encounter it surrendered to the popular will. Now your popular devil is more dangerous than your vulgar devil. Bulk and lungs count for something, and he can gild his speech aptly. He has prevailed once more, and the Irish Literary Theatre must now be considered the property of the rabblement of the most belated race in Europe."
It is equally unsafe at present to say of Mr. Yeats that he has or has not genius. In aim and form The Wind among the Reeds is poetry of the highest order, and The Adoration of the Magi (a story which one of the great Russians might have written) shows what Mr. Yeats can do when he breaks with the half-gods. But an esthete has a floating will, and Mr. Yeat’s treacherous instinct of adaptability must be blamed for his recent association with a platform from which even self-respect should have urged him to refrain.
I should read him. I'm intrigued. A Vision sounds better than the poetry though.
In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon's dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty "is manifestly true of W.B.Y."
I dunno that Napoleon actually said that, but it's intriguing. What was happening when Dissensians were 20?