Like T.S. Eliot's "The Sacred Wood" (1920), W.B. Yeats's "General Introduction for All my Work" (1937) remains essential reading. (Curious both are bi-initialed names; can't do this with the two prior famous Williams, WW and Shake, neither sporting a middle name.) Want an introduction to Dante? Read T.S. To Spenser? Read W.B.
"I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech" and in this English poetry has followed him, he asserts (521). "It was a long time before I had made a language to my liking" but about 1917 he discovered he needed, not as Wordsworth, words in common use, but "a powerful and passionate syntax." "I would have poetry turn its back on all that modish curiosity, psychology.." (530).
Love his quoting Lady Gregory's rejection of a play in the modern manner sent to the Abbey Theatre,"'Tragedy must be a joy to the man who dies.' neither scholars nor the populace have sung or read anything generation after generation because of its pain." Marvelously appropriate to plays in our time (2005-2017), so often deliberately depressing. Lady Gregory and Yeats support the Shakespeare scholar Hugh Richmond who questions new plays and old tragedies that are performed to depress, and not exhilarate (Intro to Shakespeare's Tragedies Reviewed 2015).
Wonderful essays on Spenser, Shelley (especially the philosophy imbedded in his poetry--Yeats arguing that to last, philosophy must be embedded in poetry), and Berkeley--whose attempt to establish a Trinity College mission in Bermuda, a college for Native Americans, impinges on my residence, since I live about 20 miles from Berkeley's saltbox house near Newport, RI. Yeats notes Berkeley's Bermuda project had "a learned city so carefully mapped out, a steeple in the centre"; as for the Indian students, "He that cannot live must dream. Did tar-water, a cure-all learnt from American Indians, suggest though he could not quiet men's minds he might give their bodies respite…"(399). From this I learned the Native source of the tar shampoo my dermatologist recommended for me. ( )