Gonzalo Barr

A conversation is usually described as an exchange of thoughts involving more than one person.  The OED defines it as an “[i]nformal exchange of ideas by spoken words.”  I don’t think anyone would frown today if you said that you had a “conversation” by email.

The conversation I have in mind, though, is different.  It involves one author inspiring another author to answer him hundreds of years later.

Sometime in the last quarter of the 1500s, Michel de Montaigne gave up the law and politics to write.  Although he had dedicated his youth to the practical world of action, he spent the remainder of his life in contemplation.  And he wrote this –

My actions would tell more about [chance] than about me.  […]  It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence.  –  Montaigne, Essays, “Of Practice,” II.6 (Frame trans.)

More than 300 years later, W. B. Yeats wrote “Ego Dominus Tuus,” a poem that begins –

Grow rich, popular and full of influence,
And should they paint or write, still it is action

I would like to think that Yeats was somehow answering Montaigne.  What would Montaigne have answered back?

Image of Michel de Montaigne and photo of W.B.Yeats, Wikipedia; Sources:  Michel de Montaigne, “Of Practice,” Essays II:6 (Frame trans. 1957), at 274, W.B. Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus,” bartleby.com