Manic Street Preachers

Ultimately the mature artist comes to understand that interpretation, criticism, approval - how the thing you've created is received in the world - are as nothing when set against the act of creation itself. 'What cared I who set them on to ride?' Yeats says, speaking of his poems in The Circus Animals Desertion. The process itself is all there is. Everything else is noise. It’s a late poem, written towards the end of his life, and in the final stanza Yeats contemplates the loss of the artistic faculty, the dimming of vision: