What is 'Popular Poetry'? by W.B. Yeats — Read

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.