“I am by nature warlike. To attack is among my instincts.”20 Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of Yeats, has the right answer. He says this feeling is just the other face of creativity, in Jungian terms, the shadow side of creativity. “The urge to destruction, like the urge to creation, is a defiance of limits; we transcend ourselves by refusing to accept completely anything that is human, and then indomitably we begin fabricating again.”21 What’s scary is that it is far easier to take the path of transcendence through destruction than to take the path of transcendence through creation.
