The Antagonism between the Poet and Magician

Abstract

Poetry is magic, Yeats would have said, but the poet is not a magician in the tradition of Mathers and Crowley. Conscious that many members of the Second Order had not thought carefully about the distinction or did not agree with him, Yeats concluded that some explanation was desirable. Having explored the nature and function of magic for his colleagues in the Second Order, he continued writing and thinking about the subject in works intended for the public at large. Especially important in the context of Yeats’s debate with his colleagues is his essay entitled ‘Magic’. It received wide distribution in Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), but had appeared earlier in The Monthly Review for September 1901. If we allow some interval between composition and publication, we may conjecture that it was written about the same time as ‘Is the Order of R.R. & A.C. to remain a Magical Order?’ At any rate, they are companion pieces, one written for the Second Order alone, the other for the public.

The difference of opinion about proper kind of symbolism between Michael and Maclagen must be accentuated. Maclagen had better be quite definitely a disciple of the Rosy Cross as that is embodied in the Fama. Michael should as definitely insist on the introduction of such a symbolism as will continue and make more precise the implicit symbolism in modern art and poetry. The antagonism must be made the antagonism between the poet and magician.¹