No More Learning

Title: The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8)
Ideas of Good and Evil

Author: William Butler Yeats

Release Date: August 5, 2015 [EBook #49613]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF W B YEATS, VOL 6 ***




Produced by Emmy, mollypit and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www. pgdp. net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)










THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
BEING THE SIXTH VOLUME OF
THE COLLECTED WORKS IN
VERSE & PROSE OF WILLIAM
BUTLER YEATS :: IMPRINTED
AT THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD
PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
MCMVIII


LONDON:
CHAPMAN & HALL
LIMITED




CONTENTS


PAGE

WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'? 1

SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY 13

MAGIC 23

THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS 55

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY'S POETRY 71

AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON 111

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION 131

WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE
'DIVINE COMEDY' 138

SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING 176

THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY 185

THE THEATRE 200

THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 210

THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY 230

THE MOODS 238

THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX 240

THE RETURN OF ULYSSES 243

IRELAND AND THE ARTS 249

THE GALWAY PLAINS 259

EMOTION OF MULTITUDE 264




WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'?


I THINK it was a Young Ireland Society that set my mind running on
'popular poetry. ' We used to discuss everything that was known to us
about Ireland, and especially Irish literature and Irish history. We
had no Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in
English, and quoted them in our speeches. I could have told you at that
time the dates of the birth and death, and quoted the chief poems, of
men whose names you have not heard, and perhaps of some whose names I
have forgotten. I knew in my heart that the most of them wrote badly,
and yet such romance clung about them, such a desire for Irish poetry
was in all our minds, that I kept on saying, not only to others but
to myself, that most of them wrote well, or all but well. I had read
Shelley and Spenser and had tried to mix their styles together in a
pastoral play which I have not come to dislike much, and yet I do not
think Shelley or Spenser ever moved me as did these poets. I thought
one day--I can remember the very day when I thought it--'If somebody
could make a style which would not be an English style and yet would
be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire from him,
and we would have a really great school of ballad poetry in Ireland.
If these poets, who have never ceased to fill the newspapers and the
ballad-books with their verses, had a good tradition they would write
beautifully and move everybody as they move me. ' Then a little later on
I thought, 'If they had something else to write about besides political
opinions, if more of them would write about the beliefs of the people
like Allingham, or about old legends like Ferguson, they would find
it easier to get a style. ' Then, with a deliberateness that still
surprises me, for in my heart of hearts I have never been quite certain
that one should be more than an artist, that even patriotism is more
than an impure desire in an artist, I set to work to find a style and
things to write about that the ballad writers might be the better.
They are no better, I think, and my desire to make them so was, it may
be, one of the illusions Nature holds before one, because she knows
that the gifts she has to give are not worth troubling about. It is for
her sake that we must stir ourselves, but we would not trouble to get
out of bed in the morning, or to leave our chairs once we are in them,
if she had not her conjuring bag. She wanted a few verses from me, and
because it would not have seemed worth while taking so much trouble
to see my books lie on a few drawing-room tables, she filled my head
with thoughts of making a whole literature, and plucked me out of the
Dublin art schools where I should have stayed drawing from the round,
and sent me into a library to read bad translations from the Irish,
and at last down into Connaught to sit by turf fires. I wanted to
write 'popular poetry' like those Irish poets, for I believed that all
good literatures were popular, and even cherished the fancy that the
Adelphi melodrama, which I had never seen, might be good literature,
and I hated what I called the coteries. I thought that one must write
without care, for that was of the coteries, but with a gusty energy
that would put all straight if it came out of the right heart. I had
a conviction, which indeed I have still, that one's verses should
hold, as in a mirror, the colours of one's own climate and scenery in
their right proportion; and, when I found my verses too full of the
reds and yellows Shelley gathered in Italy, I thought for two days of
setting things right, not as I should now by making rhythms faint
and nervous and filling my images with a certain coldness, a certain
wintry wildness, but by eating little and sleeping upon a board. I felt
indignant with Matthew Arnold because he complained that somebody,
who had translated Homer into a ballad measure, had tried to write
epic to the tune of Yankee Doodle. It seemed to me that it did not
matter what tune one wrote to, so long as that gusty energy came often
enough and strongly enough. And I delighted in Victor Hugo's book
upon Shakespeare, because he abused critics and coteries and thought
that Shakespeare wrote without care or premeditation and to please
everybody. I would indeed have had every illusion had I believed in
that straightforward logic, as of newspaper articles, which so tickles
the ears of the shopkeepers; but I always knew that the line of Nature
is crooked, that, though we dig the canal beds as straight as we can,
the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.

From that day to this I have been busy among the verses and stories
that the people make for themselves, but I had been busy a very little
while before I knew that what we call popular poetry never came from
the people at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and
Macaulay in his _Lays_, and Scott in his longer poems are the poets
of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the unwritten
tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of
themselves, to the beginning of time and to the foundation of the
world, and who have not learned the written tradition which has been
established upon the unwritten. I became certain that Burns, whose
greatness has been used to justify the littleness of others, was in
part a poet of the middle class, because though the farmers he sprang
from and lived among had been able to create a little tradition of
their own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech, they had been
divided by religious and political changes from the images and emotions
which had once carried their memories backward thousands of years.
Despite his expressive speech which sets him above all other popular
poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the
imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most typical expression is
in Longfellow. Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he
tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses
to understand it.