"The pleasure of life is art, according to [William] Morris; and the greatest enemy of art is the system of Commerce and Fashion that produces both unnecessary things and a slavish compulsion to possess them. Work for art's sake was his sense, the pleasure in daily work that he imagined was the experience of the artisans who collectively created Europe's medieval architectural legacy. These views lead Morris, variously, to the romantic medievalism of The Earthly Paradise; to his commitment to handcraft and his polemical critique of the deadly drabness of nineteenth-century English industrial design and architecture; to revolutionary socialism; and, significantly, to a militant environmentalism in many ways similar to our own present-day ecology movement and the program of Germany's Greens. For Morris, leisure and idleness, as well as pleasure, were central components of any civilization worthy of the name. His insistence that there must always be 'waste places and wilds in it' suggests most acutely the originality of his position and his rejection of more utilitarian forms of social progress." (115)
116: "[I]dlesness and emptiness are crucial notions for Morris, and his immensely popular early poetry was mean to serve as a respite from the toil of alienated labor; both the reading and the writing of poetry were to be an activity of pleasure"
"joyance"
see The Political Writings of William Morris (collected 1973)