Ideas of Good and Evil

Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) is a collection of wide-ranging essays by Irish poet W.B. Yeats. Writing on such subjects as the art of poetry, politics, and the occult, Yeats proves himself to be not only a master of verse and drama, but an immensely talented essayist and thorough scholar. "What is 'Popular Poetry'?" reflects on a changing Irish literary landscape which has, over the course of Yeats' career, established its own place in world literature apart from, and perhaps surpassing, its English counterpart. Juxtaposing "the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes the written tradition" and "the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten tradition," Yeats argues that the spirit of Irish poetry depends on its unfaltering connection to the itinerant bards and storytellers whose gift for musicality and memory kept language alive for a widely illiterate people. In "Magic," Yeats, a longtime member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, discusses