'of the Dark Past': The Brittle Magic Nation of Joyce's Poetics (Critical Essay‪)‬

... a play or a novel necessarily describes people in their relation to one another, and is, therefore, frequently concerned with the conscience in the ordinary sense of that word, but lyric poetry is the voice of what metaphysicians call innate knowledge, that is to say, of conscience, for it expresses the relation of the soul to eternal beauty and truth as no other writing can express it. (1) W. B. Yeats, Letters