but they both lived during times (overlapping of course) of tremendous
technological and social changes. To me both authors give the sense
(intermittantly, with Yeats) that something great and magical has passed out of
reach --perhaps related to the feeling that the world in which they came of age
is slipping away.
Something from history classes is vaguely ( and perhaps wrongly) telling me
that the interest in mythology and folklore was in some cases connected to the
rise of nationalism. It would be interesting to see how many writers
referenced their "national" mythology extensively during the 19th and early
20th
centuries.
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Field guides explain color,
vagrant range,
the vague translations of a song,
but nothing of the distance
that develops into absence.
-Walter Pavlich
