They included all the songs and stories he had heard from his father , the poems recited by his teachers , the alphabet-words stuck up round the kitchen by his mother , glittering fragments of hopkins and joyce and yeats .
I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me - in a thrilling phrase which I came across in yeats - ' hold reality and justice in a single vision ' .
I left the college green to address the irish parliament , reminding them that all of us had to do more to bring the tangible benefits of peace to ordinary irish citizens ; as yeats said : too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart .
Not only that yeats had lived his life and written his poetry through the very essence of his irish sensibility , but that it was offensive to think irishness -- no matter if it was psychological , social or literary -- was something to be transcended .
Fractious family relations may not be uncommon , yet the extent to which these writers-including w. b. yeats , thomas mann , james baldwin and john cheever-managed to fight with their parents , siblings and children make arguments over the dinner table seem like a specialised art form .