Ideas of Good and Evil
_BY THE SAME WRITER--_ THE SECRET ROSE THE CELTIC TWILIGHT POEMS THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS THE SHADOWY WATERS PLAYS FOR AN IRISH THEATRE VOL. I. WHERE THERE IS NOTHING VOL. II. SHORTER PLAYS
Ideas of Good and Evil
Second Edition
Ideas of Good and Evil.
By W. B. Yeats
A. H. BULLEN, 47 Great Russell
Street, London, W.C. MCMIII
Contents.
WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'? 1
SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY 16
MAGIC 29
THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS 70
THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY'S POETRY 90
AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON 142
WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION 168
WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO _THE DIVINE COMEDY_ 176
SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING 226
THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY 237
THE THEATRE 257
THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 270
THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY 296
THE MOODS 306
THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX 308
_THE RETURN OF ULYSSES_ 312
IRELAND AND THE ARTS 320
THE GALWAY PLAINS 333
EMOTION OF MULTITUDE 339
_Note._--The Essay on _Symbolism in Painting_ originally formed part of an Introduction to _A Book of Images drawn by W. T. Horton_ (Unicorn Press), 1898.
WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'?
I think it was a Young Ireland Society that set my mind running
Table of contents (by pages)
- 1: Ideas of Good and Evil by W. B. Yeats
- 2: And I hated what I called the coteries
- 3: Poetry that is not popular poetry presupposes
- 4: Which presupposes the written tradition
- 5: Thou art the surpassing pilot star
- 6: When I got to London I gave the notation
- 7: It is written in the old C clef
- 8: In the power of creating magical illusions
- 9: I following the story of the seeress
- 10: In a moment more the seeress said
- 11: Noticed that he passed over two gravestones
- 12: The bonne has just told us you had your arm in a sling
- 13: And will not mind unbelief and misbelief and ridicule
- 14: If I can unintentionally cast a glamour
- 15: Of those less transitory minds
- 16: Having for the time forgotten both nightmare and symbol
- 17: Between what I called inherent symbols and arbitrary symbols
- 18: Have to fear the anger of the people of Faery
- 19: And not the Grail of Malory or Wagner
- 20: And when she praises Birdalone's naked body
- 21: Are not grapes made by the sunlight and the sap
- 22: And they saw an unearthly Paradise
- 23: I have re read Prometheus Unbound
- 24: Against the tyrannies of the world
- 25: A witness for that 'power unappealable
- 26: If thou wouldst be with that which thou wouldst seek
- 27: They change continually in his poetry
- 28: Many images that are certainly symbols
- 29: Of images that are living souls
- 30: With Shelley's description of the cave of the Witch of Atlas
- 31: Called souls not only Naiads but bees
- 32: The caverns of the mind are obscure and shadowy
- 33: In the first canto of Laon and Cythna
- 34: The most learned of the Hermetists said
- 35: Shelley could not help but see her with unfriendly eyes
- 36: Whose bodies have become quiet as an agate lamp
- 37: III do not think there is anything I disliked in Stratford
- 38: As our naturalistic scenery does
- 39: Aufidius was a more reasonable man than Coriolanus
- 40: But the model Shakespeare held up before England
- 41: Considered that myths are the activities of the Daemons
- 42: Might have had the simplicity and unity of Greek literature
- 43: Binds us to mortality because it binds us to the senses
- 44: He was a symbolist who had to invent his symbols
- 45: The living voice is ever living in its inmost joy
- 46: And to cleave always to the Florentine
- 47: Sharp and wiry the boundary line
- 48: In the notes on Sir Joshua Reynolds
- 49: The illustrations to Thornton's Virgil
- 50: The technique of Blake was imperfect
- 51: As he understood the word pagan
- 52: Where Dante emerges from the earthly Paradise
- 53: And preached the cultivated life
- 54: He who despises and mocks a mental gift in another
- 55: Who deified imaginative freedom
- 56: Unwin in 1892 that the illustrations of Gustave Dore
- 57: He would have prospered less than Botticelli or even Clovio
- 58: When I sat for my portrait to a German Symbolist in Paris
- 59: But he is a fragmentary symbolist
- 60: And the journalist is convinced
- 61: Evoke indefinable and yet precise emotions
- 62: Are continually making and unmaking mankind
- 63: Symbols that evoke emotions alone
- 64: And if the symbols are merely emotional
- 65: If the Gaelic League would translate it into Gaelic
- 66: As audiences and actors changed
- 67: Within a pulsation of the artery
- 68: As the poet of the Kalevala said of himself
- 69: By paved fountain or by rushy brook
- 70: And of the love that is in faeryland
- 71: Talks of the lovelessness of the Irishman
- 72: Hyde in the beautiful prose which he first writes in Gaelic
- 73: The still unfaded legends of Arthur and of the Holy Grail
- 74: In picturesque and declamatory books
- 75: Turned from serious poetry altogether
- 76: Symons has written lately on M
- 77: And set about him inextinguishable magical lamps
- 78: These are gods That slay the suitors
- 79: Bridges been a true Shakespearian
- 80: Might perish if the ancient ceremony perished
- 81: As in the hands of the Greek craftsmen
- 82: I could not now write of any other country but Ireland
- 83: And he told me it was Cruachmaa of the Sidhe
- 84: French dramatic poetry is so often a little rhetorical