WB Yeats

Yeats' essay was a little confusing, but I think I got the general gist of it. He's basically saying that symbolism is an important part of poetry--perhaps the most important part of poetry--because poetry is an expression of ourselves, and we as humans are constantly living, thinking, and feeling through symbols. These can be emotional symbols--ones that incite particular feelings within us--or intellectual symbols--ones that appeal to particular ideas and thoughts that people commonly hold to be great and important. Since we use so many symbols in our everyday lives, it is only natural that our work--including poetry--would be rife with symbolism as well. By learning to to find and decipher (for lack of a better word) these symbols, we uncover the poetry's true meaning.