Here are two consecutive quotes from Yeats.
Yeats read a chapter or two of Ulysses, which had been serialized in the Little Review from Paris. His first comment was: “A mad book!”
But then later, not much later, he said, “I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence … It is an entirely new thing — neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.”
