Abstract

As every teacher of literature knows, obscure writing is not necessarily the most problematic kind to deal with. A sonnet by Donne or an equal number of lines by Dylan Thomas will handily fill the teaching hour. But what about that other kind of writing, the kind that imposes silence, not by its obvious difficulty but by its infuriating obviousness, the perfection of its form, the simplicity of its language, the transparency of its meaning? There is no trouble filling the hour with Yeats’s Byzantium poems, but what about this one?The fascination of what’s difficultHas dried the sap out of my veins, and rentSpontaneous joy and natural contentOut of my heart. There’s something ails our coltThat must, as if it had not..