"As I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard and cold, some articulation of the Image, which is the opposite of all that I am in my daily life, and all that my country is; yet man or nation can no more make this Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil into which it is cast."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_William_Butler_Yeats