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The earliest essay is dated 1895, the latest 1937. Of the three pieces printed for the first time, two are worth having: a general introduction to his work which Yeats wrote for a complete American edition (never published), and a short introduction to his plays. The Modern Poetry broadcast of 1936 is also included, though not the equally eccentric and more useful preface to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. There are introductions to Gitanjali and to the Hone and Rossi book on Berkeley, and three essays on Eastern mysticism occasioned by Yeats’s friendship with Purohit Swami.

     If this were all, the book would scarcely be remarkable. In fact it is important; and not just for the cross-lights it throws on Yeats’s poetry but for the subtlety and range of the earlier criticism. For the strength of the book is that it gets into print again the essays on symbolism and related topics (Ideas of Good and Evil) and the essays that emerged from the first decade of the Abbey (The Cutting of an Agate).

     Between them, these collections span twenty-five years: from the Yeats of the nineties, when our servants are to live for us and the imagination ‘neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time’, to the Yeats of Responsibilities and the Playboy riots, for whom: ‘Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories and sensations of the body.’

     There is a sympathetic study of the symbolism of Shelley; and Yeats notes, looking back, that is was he and not Blake who ‘had shaped my life’. Yet the presence of Blake is felt everywhere in the early essays. The thirty pages devoted to Blake are among the finest in the book, and it is Blake Yeats goes to for the extreme statement of his own convictions: Blake who had affirmed unequivocally that art reaches through the natural to the real world, Blake for whom the imagination sympathizes too profoundly with everything that lives to admit the facile morality of the reason.

     To turn from Blake to the other really impressive criticism, the three essays on Synge, is to move from art as defining spiritual realities to art as the expression of human passions. (The corresponding movement in the poems of 1897 to 1912 sprang from events in Yeats’s life: the marriage of Maud Gonne, the struggles with the Abbey and the controversy over the Lane pictures, as well as the friendship with Synge.) But this shift of emphasis is less radical than it appears, since for Blake the dualism of soul and body did not exist: ‘Man has no body distinct from his soul; for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses.’ Energy is eternal delight, and is from the body.

     This energy Yeats found in Synge; and in Synge also a clear recognition that the concern of art is, in Yeats’s phrase, with the Tree of Life and not with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As an ally against the clichés of politics and the newspapers, against the tired abstractions of the problem play, Synge was invaluable. Yet Yeats’s aims in drama could hardly have been farther from Synge’s, and his deep understanding and appreciation of Synge are significant. In the main, Yeats is a critic of occasional, often profound, insights: both in structure and rhythm his essays are meditative, reveries rather than arguments. But this helps him to clarify the strength of Synge, which is not in plot, characterization, or even (strictly speaking) dialogue, but in his imaginative grasp of passions and of the body.

     In part Yeats’s perception of this strength is an understanding of the man. Thus he sees very clearly why the Aran islands were so valuable: ‘He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild islands, because there, set out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself.’ But already in the Discoveries essay of 1906, though there is no overt reference to Synge, energy is for Yeats rooted in passion and the body. ‘In literature, partly from the lack of that spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have lost in personality, in our delight in the whole man — blood, imagination, intellect running together.’ We have lost, in fact, that unity of being which Yeats, looking back over his work at the end of his life, identifies with Blake’s Imagination. And it is characteristic of Yeats to see, as Synge saw, one cause of this loss in the lack of ‘that spoken word which knits us to normal man’. The first, though not the earliest, essay in this volume, tackles the question: What is ‘Popular Poetry’? And an important factor in the development of Yeats’s lyric writing was his lifelong conviction that poetry should deal in the passions of the normal man and be written for the speaking voice.

     For all the complexity of his mature style, Yeats’s conception of poetry was never esoteric. It was aristocratic, in that he rejected out of hand any weakening of form to admit opinion or the merely personal. Art, in the aphorism of Goethe that he never tires of quoting, is art because it is not nature. It is this conviction that gives permanent value to the essay on the highly formal Noh plays of Japan and to an attack (in Discoveries) on naturalistic drama as timely now as when it was launched. Yeats’s criticism is neither a coherent theory nor, as Eliot’s is, a series of explorations and assessments guided by his poetry. Often his prose is inconsequent, sometimes vague. But the sustained affirmation of the integrity of art in an age of journalism is exhilarating.