Ideas of good and evil ( 1903) by W. B. Yeats - PDF book

Ideas of good and evil 

Collection of Poems by the Irish Poet William Butler Yeats 

 W. B. Yeats

Contents:

What is 'popular poetry'? -- Speaking to the psaltery -- Magic -- The happiest of the poets -- The philosophy of Shelley's poetry -- At Stratford-on-Avon -- William Blake und the imagination -- William Blake and his illustrations to The divine comedy -- Symbolism in painting -- The symbolism of poetry -- The theatre -- The Celtic element in literature -- The autumn of the body -- The moods -- The body of the Father Christian Rosencrux -- The return of Ulysses -- Ireland and the arts -- The Galway plains -- Emotion of multitude

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.

Excerpt:

misunderstandings of others. Go down
into the street and read to your baker or
your candlestick- maker any poem which
is not popular poetry. I have heard a
baker, who was clever enough with his
oven, deny that Tennyson could have
known what he was writing when he
wrote ' Warming his five wits, the white
owl in the belfry sits,' and once when I
read out Omar Khayyam to one of the
best of candlestick-makers, he said, ' What
is the meaning of "we come like water
and like the wind we go " ? ' Or go down
into the street with some thought whose
bare meaning must be plain to everybody ;
take with you Ben Jonson's ' Beauty like
sorrow dwelleth everywhere,' and find out
how utterly its enchantment depends on
an association of beauty with sorrow which
written tradition has from the unwritten,
which had it in its turn from ancient religion ;

 or take with you these lines in whose

 
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