"Yeats replied to an Indian visitor, who had asked him if he had a message for Asia, by grasping a Japanese sword and saying: “Conflict. More conflict.” He notes too, much later in his book, Yeats writing that when he was a boy he “took satisfaction in certain public disasters, felt a sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin”." John Banville on a new study of Yeats • Irish Times

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