Ideas Of Good And Evil

Before Yeats won awards, his interest in spirituality and folklore drove him to write at length about Irish mythology and the occult before the turn of the 20th century. In many ways, it was Yeats who popularised the characters of Celtic mythology and medieval Irish folklore for contemporaneous audiences. "Ideas of Good and Evil" is a collection of essays about art written during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His thoughts on symbolism versus allegory, art as "the theatre of commerce" versus art as a "great Passion" are marvellous. William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish literary establishment who helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.A Protestant of Anglo-Irish descent, Yeats was born in Sandymount and was educated in Dublin and London and spent childhood holidays in County Sligo.