"There is still, to be honest, these vast lands flat on a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems that have been developed outside of their lives, and passions of a past that can still move our hearts to the pure act of the imagination. It could even, if he had a genius, and he was born in Ireland, these people write for theater and poems like those of Greece. Is it not true that the greatest poetry always requires a people who listen to it?
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The poet must always be preferred in the community in which the best minds are expressions of the people in a community that seeks in vain to copy the best minds. Owning too well the thoughts of some value, and accuracy that can be learned at school, as well as belonging to an aristocracy, are all things like a small puddle that dries quickly. Only a people is a big river, and this is why I am convinced that wherever the culture of a people is dead, but the nation is about to die. "
William Butler Yeats, from" The happiest of the poets "(Mattioli 1885, translated by Nicholas Manuppelli)
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