Ideas of Good and Evil — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Poet as Critic of His Own Craft

Yeats does not write as a detached scholar but as a practicing poet working out his own principles. In 'What is Popular Poetry?' he describes trying to mix the styles of Shelley and Spenser into a pastoral play he 'has not come to dislike much,' and later imagines a style 'musical and full of colour' that could ignite a school of ballad poetry in Ireland. These are not abstract prescriptions; they are the recorded experiments of a writer who measures theory against his own creative experience.

Similarly, in 'The Symbolism of Poetry,' he argues that 'all sounds, all colours, all forms' can evoke indefinable emotions, and that the poet's task is to arrange them into a 'continuous and indefinable symbolism.' The essay draws on his own practice as a poet and playwright, making the collection a kind of artist's manifesto rather than a conventional critical survey.

Blake's Visionary System as Artistic Method

Two essays on William Blake form the core of the collection. Yeats presents Blake not as a mystic eccentric but as a systematic thinker whose doctrines about imagination have practical consequences for art. He explains Blake's belief that 'the world of imagination' is 'the world of eternity,' and that the artist must distinguish between beings of imagination and those 'created by the phantasy, in uninspired moments, out of memory and whim.'

Yeats traces Blake's struggle to escape the 'Venetian and Flemish Demons'—painters who studied nature for its own sake rather than to discover 'the shadows of imperishable beings.' He quotes Blake's relief at having 'reduced that spectrous fiend to his station,' the reasoning and sensual part of the mind. For Yeats, this is not biography but a model of artistic discipline: the visionary must purify perception through study of the great masters and reject mere memory of sensation.

Symbolism and the Limits of Popular Poetry

Throughout the collection, Yeats returns to the tension between accessible, politically engaged verse and a more hermetic, symbolic art. In 'What is Popular Poetry?' he notes that Irish poets 'who have never ceased to fill the newspapers and the ballad-books' might write beautifully if they had 'a good tradition' and subjects beyond 'political opinions.' Yet he also admits that Shelley and Spenser, his own models, 'never moved me as did these poets.'

This ambivalence is not resolved. In 'The Celtic Element in Literature,' he argues that the Celtic imagination is naturally symbolic, finding 'magic' in nature, but he does not claim that popular ballads achieve this. The essays collectively suggest that true art requires a visionary discipline that popular poetry lacks, even as Yeats acknowledges the emotional power of that poetry. The reader is left to weigh the claims of accessibility against those of esoteric depth.

These essays reward a reader willing to follow Yeats through his evolving arguments, often circling back to the same figures and ideas from different angles. The excerpts show a writer deeply engaged with the mechanics of artistic creation—how a poet finds a style, how a painter resists the lure of mere representation, how symbols carry meaning across generations. For those interested in Yeats's own development, the collection offers a workshop of his thinking, incomplete but revealing.

Reading Yeats again, I found myself missing that older world where stories felt eternal, not just current. It made me think of a quiet evening with an old medieval text, where the same longing for something lasting hums beneath the surface. There’s a particular comfort in that shared ache. I keep Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature — Edition Insights nearby for those moods.