William Butler Yeats
Irish poet and playwright (1865–1939)
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish symbolist poet, dramatist and mystic. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He compiled the Oxford Book of Modern Verse.
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Quotes
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Whenever I remake a song
Should know what issue is at stake,
It is myself that I remake.
- The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
- Letter to Frederick J. Gregg (undated, Sligo, late summer, 1886)
- This melancholy London. I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
- Letter to Katharine Tynan (25 August 1888)
- I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all — the colleges I mean — like an opera.
- Letter to Katharine Tynan (25 August 1888)
- I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal, — that is they have ceased to be self-centered, have given up their individuality.... The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
- Letter to Katharine Tynan (30 August 1888)
- Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.
- Letter to Ellen O'Leary (3 February 1889)
- The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.- The Countess Cathleen, last lines (1892)
- We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
- "Earth, Fire and Water" from The Celtic Twilight (1893)
- The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
- Letter to the Editor, Dublin Daily Express (27 February 1895)
- The friends that have it I do wrong
Whenever I remake a song
Should know what issue is at stake,
It is myself that I remake.- The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, II, preliminary poem (1908)
- In dreams begins responsibility.
- Epigraph to the book Responsibilities (1914); this was later adapted as the title of the story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (1937) by Delmore Schwartz.
- Do what you will. I do not understand stops. I write my work so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops & commas.
- In letter, W.B. Yeats, Chiswell, Oxford, 13 July 1915 to Bridges
- We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
- Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918): Anima Hominis, part v
- One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: "Hammer your thoughts into unity." For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence.
- "If I Were Four-and-Twenty," printed in Irish Statesman (23 August 1919)
- I agree about Shaw — he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.
- Letter to George William Russell (1 July 1921)
- This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am afraid that Labour disagrees with me in that. On this matter I am a crusted Tory. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says "there is no wisdom without leisure."
- Speech, (28 March 1923), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Damage to Property (Compensation) Bill [1]
- I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
- Speech (7 June 1923), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Censorship of Films Bill. [2]
- The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.
- Speech (3 March 1926), Seanad Éireann (Irish Free Senate), on the Coinage Bill. [3]
- Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
- Letter to Olivia Shakespear (24 March 1927)
- The Babylonian starlight brought
A fabulous, formless darkness in;
Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.- Two Songs from a Play, as quoted from The Cycles of History
Crossways (1889)
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To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.- The Stolen Child, st. 1
The Song Of The Happy Shepherd
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Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head.
- The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head.- l. 1–5.
- Words alone are certain good.
- l. 10.
- Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
- l. 57.
The Rose (1893)
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Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways.
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
- Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;
- Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.- To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time
- Come near, come near, come near — Ah, leave me still
A little space for the rose-breath to fill!
Lest I no more hear common things that crave;
The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,
The field-mouse running by me in the grass,
And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.
Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.- To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time
- I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;- The Lake Isle of Innisfree, st. 1
- I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.- The Lake Isle of Innisfree, st. 3
- A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love:
The folk who are buying and selling,
The clouds on their journey above,
The cold wet winds ever blowing,
And the shadowy hazel grove
Where mouse-grey waters are flowing,
Threaten the head that I love.- The Pity Of Love; in recent years a statement which might have originated as a misquotation of the first lines of this has been attributed to Oscar Wilde: "To give and not expect return, that is what lies at the heart of love." — no occurrence prior to 1999 has yet been located.
- The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man’s image and his cry.- The Sorrow Of Love, st. 1
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.- When You Are Old, st. 1–3
The Rose of the World
edit- Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.- St. 1
- We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.- St. 2
- Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.- St. 3
The Land of Heart's Desire (1894)
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Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
- The Land of Faery,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.- Lines 48–52
- Life moves out of a red flare of dreams
Into a common light of common hours,
Until old age bring the red flare again.
- I would mould a world of fire and dew
With no one bitter, grave, or over wise,
And nothing marred or old to do you wrong.
- Land of Heart's Desire,
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.- Lines 373–375
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
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And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
- And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.- Into The Twilight, st. 4
- I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
- Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea.- The Fiddler Of Dooney, st. 1
In The Seven Woods (1904)
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Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly.
No one has ever loved but you and I.
- I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods
Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees
Hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away
The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness
That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile
Tara uprooted, and new commonness
Upon the throne and crying about the streets
And hanging its paper flowers from post to post,
Because it is alone of all things happy.
I am contented, for I know that Quiet
Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart
Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer,
Who but awaits His house to shoot, still hands
A cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee.
- I thought of your beauty, and this arrow,
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
There's no man may look upon her, no man,
As when newly grown to be a woman,
Tall and noble but with face and bosom
Delicate in colour as apple blossom.
This beauty's kinder, yet for a reason
I could weep that the old is out of season.
- One that is ever kind said yesterday:
'Your well-belovéd's hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.'
Heart cries, 'No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.'
O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head,
You'd know the folly of being comforted.
- Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
- I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'
O hurry where by water among the trees
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have but looked upon their images--
Would none had ever loved but you and I!Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood?--
O that none ever loved but you and I!O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry—
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.
- Sweetheart, do not love too long:
I loved long and long,
And grew to be out of fashion
Like an old song.
All through the years of our youth
Neither could have known
Their own thought from the other's
We were so much at one.
But O, in a minute she changed--
O do not love too long,
Or you will grow out of fashion
Like an old song.
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Since Adam’s fall but needs much laboring.
- A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.- St. 1
- It’s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
Precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.- St. 3
- I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.- St. 5
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
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I look at you, and I sigh.
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause…
Half lion, half child, is at peace.
- Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
- The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
- Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
- Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.
- I that have not your faith, how shall I know
That in the blinding light beyond the grave
We’ll find so good a thing as that we have lost?
The hourly kindness, the day’s common speech,
The habitual content of each with each
When neither soul nor body has been crossed.
- I swayed upon the gaudy stern
The butt-end of a steering-oar,
And saw wherever I could turn
A crowd upon a shore.
And though I would have hushed the crowd,
There was no mother's son but said,
'What is the figure in a shroud
Upon a gaudy bed?'
And after running at the brim
Cried out upon that thing beneath
--It had such dignity of a limb--
By the sweet name of Death.
Though I'd my finger on my lip,
What could I but take up the song?
And running crowd and gaudy ship
Cried out the whole night long,
Crying amid the glittering sea,
Naming it with the ecstatic breath,
Because it had such dignity,
By the sweet name of Death.
- Some may have blamed you that you took away
The verses that could move them on the day
When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind
With lightning, you went from me, and I could find
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
That were like memories of you--but now
We'll out, for the world lives as long ago;
And while we're in our laughing, weeping fit,
Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit.
But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.
- Ah, that Time could touch a form
That could show what Homer's age
Bred to be a hero's wage.
'Were not all her life but a storm,
Would not painters pain a form
Of such noble lines,' I said,
'Such a delicate high head,
All that sternness amid charm,
All that sweetness amid strength?
Ah, but peace that comes at length,
Came when Time had touched her form.
O heart, be at peace, because
Nor knave nor dolt can break
What's not for their applause
Being for a woman's sake.
Enough if the work has seemed,
So did she your strength renew,
A dream that a lion had dreamed
Till the wilderness cried aloud,
A secret between you two,
Between the proud and the proud.What, still you would have their praise!
But here's a haughtier text,
The labyrinth of her days
That her own strangeness perplexed;
And how what her dreaming gave
Earned slander, ingratitude,
From self-same dolt and knave;
Aye, and worse wrong than these.
Yet she, singing upon her road,
Half lion, half child, is at peace.
- You say, as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said or sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these;
But was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?
- Have you made greatness your companion,
Although it be for children that you sigh:
These are the clouds about the fallen sun,
The majesty that shuts his burning eye.
- O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Responsibilities (1914)
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Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end.
Than Triumph, turn away…
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat …Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
- Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain
Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end.
- While I, that reed-throated whisperer
Who comes at need, although not now as once
A clear articulation in the air,
But inwardly, surmise companions
Beyond the fling of the dull ass’s hoof
—Ben Jonson’s phrase—and find when June is come
At Kyle-na-no under that ancient roof
A sterner conscience and a friendlier home,
I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
Those undreamt accidents that have made me
—Seeing that Fame has perished that long while,
Being but a part of ancient ceremony—
Notorious, till all my priceless things
Are but a post the passing dogs defile.
- Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.- September 1913, st. 3
- Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbours’ eyes?
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
- Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of Silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
- I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
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They paddle in the cold…
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love…
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.
- I would be ignorant as the dawn
That merely stood, rocking the glittering coach
Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses;
I would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw —
Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
- The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky.- The Wild Swans At Coole, st. 1
- Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old.- The Wild Swans At Coole, st. 4
- Some burn damp faggots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As ’twere all life’s epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?
- I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind
That shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind
All those that manhood tried, or childhood loved
Or boyish intellect approved,
With some appropriate commentary on each;
Until imagination brought
A fitter welcome; but a thought
Of that late death took all my heart for speech.- In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory, st. 12
- I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My county is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
- I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives,
Yet praise the winters gone:
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey’s end
With Landor and with Donne.- To A Young Beauty, st. 3
- All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?- The Scholars, st. 2
- When have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon?
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.- Lines Written In Dejection, st. 1
- I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
- His Phoenix, refrain
- Hands, do what you’re bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
- We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind
And lost the old nonchalance of the hand;
Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush,
We are but critics, or but half create,
Timid, entangled, empty and abashed,
Lacking the countenance of our friends.- Ego Dominus Tuus, st. 4
- Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
The Second Coming (1919)
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Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- First published in The Dial (November 1920) and The Nation (6 November 1920), later publisehed in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) - Online text with some notes on variant editions - online text and notes
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- Opinion is not worth a rush;
In this altar-piece the knight,
Who grips his long spear so to push
That dragon through the fading light,
Loved the lady; and it’s plain
The half-dead dragon was her thought,
That every morning rose again
And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.
Could the impossible come to pass
She would have time to turn her eyes,
Her lover thought, upon the glass
And on the instant would grow wise.
- They say such different things at school.
- Michael Robartes and the Dancer
- Nothing that we love over-much
Is ponderable to our touch.- Towards Break of Day, st. 3
A terrible beauty is born.
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The stone's in the midst of all.
Can make a stone of the heart.
- I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words.- St. 1
- All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.- St. 1
- This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.- St. 2
- Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.- St. 3
- Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.- St. 3
- Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.- St. 4
- O when may it suffice?
That is heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name.- St. 4
- I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.- St. 4.
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass…
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful…
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will…
- Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.- St. 2
- May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.- St. 3
- It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of plenty is undone.- St. 4
- In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise.
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.- St. 5
- May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.- St. 6
- To be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.- St. 7
- An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?- St. 8
- All hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.- St. 9
The Tower (1928)
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Upon a woman won or woman lost?
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
- Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible.- The Tower, I
- Does the imagination dwell the most
Upon a woman won or woman lost?- The Tower, II, st. 13
- Much did I rage when young,
Being by the world oppressed,
But now with flattering tongue
It speeds the parting guest.
- Locke sank into a swoon;
The Garden died;
God took the spinning-jenny
Out of his side.- Fragments, I
- Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?- Leda and the Swan, st. 3
- Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?- Among School Children, st. 8
- The true faith discovered was
When painted panel, statuary.
Glass-mosaic, window-glass,
Amended what was told awry
By some peasant gospeller.
Into the artifice of eternity.
My bodily form from any natural thing…
- That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.- St. 1
- Cf. Nelson Algren's later, "That was no town for the aged or the aging."
- Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.- St. 3
- Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.- St. 4
_The_Golden_Bough_-_Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner_-_Tate_Britain.jpg)
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about.
Into a ploughshare?
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.
- Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about.- I, st. 1
- O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.- I, st. 2
- All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare?- I, st. 3
- Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.- I, st. 4
- The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.- I, st. 4
- But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?- I, st. 5-6
- O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.- III, st. 3
- Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.- V, st. 1
- Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.- V, st. 2
- Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked— and where are they?- V, st. 3
- Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.- V, st. 4
- Odour of blood when Christ was slain
Made all platonic tolerance vain
And vain all Doric discipline.- II, st. 1
- Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love’s pleasure drives his love away,
The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.- II, st. 2
- Whatever flames upon the night
Man’s own resinous heart has fed.- II, st. 2
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
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All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
- Whether they knew or not,
Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.
- Only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.- For Anne Gregory, st. 3
- Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.
- The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.- The Choice, st. 1
- The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.- Byzantium, st. 1
- At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.- Byzantium, st. 4
- Somewhere beyond the curtain
Of distorting days
Lives that lonely thing
That shone before these eyes
Targeted, trod like Spring.- Quarrel In Old Age, st. 2
- ‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied.'
- But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.- Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop, st. 3
- What were all the world’s alarms
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen’s arms?- Lullaby, st. 1
- Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
I gave what other women gave
That stepped out of their clothes.
But when this soul, its body off,
Naked to naked goes,
He it has found shall find therein
What none other knows,And give his own and take his own
And rule in his own right;
And though it loved in misery
Close and cling so tight,
There’s not a bird of day that dare
Extinguish that delight.- A Last Confession, St. 3 & 4
And yet again…
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.
- My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.- I, st. 3
- My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known —
That is to say, ascends to Heaven;
Only the dead can be forgiven;
But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.- I, st. 4
- What matter if I live it all once more?
Endure that toil of growing up;
The ignominy of boyhood; the distress
Of boyhood changing into man;
The unfinished man and his pain
Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;
The finished man among his enemies?—
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?- II, st. 1
- I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.- II, st. 3
- I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.- II, st. 4
_-_Rest_(1879).jpg)
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.
That are not suited for such men as come
Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.
- All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate.
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.- III, st. 1
- Test every work of intellect or faith,
And everything that your own hands have wrought
And call those works extravagance of breath
That are not suited for such men as come
Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.- III, st. 2
- My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.- IV
- Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.- V, st. 2
- Seek out reality, leave things that seem.
- VII
A Full Moon in March (1935)
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And prayer comes round again —
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
- God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone.- A Prayer For Old Age, st. 1.
- I pray — for word is out
And prayer comes round again —
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.- A Prayer For Old Age, st. 3.
- Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
What sacred drama through her body heaved
When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?- Supernatural Songs, VIII, Whence Had They Come?
Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.- Supernatural Songs, IX, The Four Ages of Man
Last Poems (1936-1939)
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Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
Which is the more blest?
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
And say my glory was I had such friends.
I talked about an apparition,
I took no trouble to convince,
Or seem plausible to a man of sense.
- All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia.- Lapis Lazuli, st. 2
- Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.- Lapis Lazuli, st. 2
- Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.- Lapis Lazuli, st. 5
- If soul may look and body touch,
Which is the more blest?- The Lady's Second Song, st. 3
- My temptation is quiet.
Here at life’s end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone,
Can make the truth known.- An Acre of Grass, st. 2
- Grant me an old man’s frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call.- An Acre of Grass, st. 3
- Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
- You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?
- You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.
- Down the mountain walls
From where pan’s cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.- News for the Delphic Oracle, st. 3
- Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.- Long-Legged Fly, refrain
- A bloody and a sudden end,
Gunshot or a noose,
For Death who takes what man would keep,
Leaves what man would lose.
- Because there is safety in derision
I talked about an apparition,
I took no trouble to convince,
Or seem plausible to a man of sense.- The Apparitions, st. 1
- I have found nothing half so good
As my long-planned half solitude,
Where I can sit up half the night
With some friend that has the wit
Not to allow his looks to tell
When I am unintelligible.- The Apparitions, st. 2
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
- Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.- The Circus Animals' Desertion, II, st. 3.
- Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.- The Circus Animals' Desertion, III
- Irish poets, earn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
- Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.- Under Ben Bulben, VI
- No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
Quotes about Yeats
editBy mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs.
The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.Now he is scattered over a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
are modified in the guts of the living.- W. H. Auden in "In Memory of W.B. Yeats' (1939)
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.- W. H. Auden in "In Memory of W.B. Yeats' (1939)
- Yeats was an inexhaustible source of delight. I’ve never known anyone so forgetful of little details. Whenever it came time for his lecture in Washington Hall on the campus, he seized his portfolio and marched over only to find after he arrived on the stage that he had brought the wrong lecture or no lecture at all in an empty portfolio. This was constantly happening.
- I knew Yeats. He made a very strong impression. He wasn't an intimate friend, but I met him at Lady Ottoline Morrell's and he talked to me about how he lived very quietly just seeing a few friends and some witches... He was a very, very unexpected personality. Well, perhaps not unexpected. One might have expected it. But a very unusual personality. Because he was, I think, a very great poet... [H]e talked in this chanting, curious, Celtic voice... He read with his great chanting voice and then he beat time, you know.
- Lord David Cecil, quoted in Tristram Powell, 'A Television Interview', in David Cecil: A Portrait by his Friends (1990), pp. 162-163
- I wrote a quasi-Chinese verse entitled ‘Quiet the Dog, Tether the Pony’, in which I took away all the punctuations. It reads like a Chinese translation but it is also an elliptical, postmodern poem. I took the title from Yeats. Yet it is a very Chinese poem because of the eclipsed pronouns.
- Marilyn Chin Interview with Asian Review of Books (2020)
- An idea of art opposed to the idea of utility, an idea of an audience opposed to the idea of popularity, an idea of the peripheral becoming the central culture – in these three ideas Yeats provided Irish writing with a programme for action. But whatever its connection with Irish nationalism, it was not, finally, a programme of separation from the English tradition. His continued adherence to it led him to define the central Irish attitude as one of self-hatred... The pathology of literary unionism has never been better defined.
- Seamus Deane, Small World: Ireland, 1798–2018 (2021), p. 138
- Born into a world in which the doctrine of 'Art for Art's sake' was generally accepted, and living on into one in which art has been asked to be instrumental to social purposes, he held firmly to the right view which is between these, though not in any way a compromise between them, and showed that an artist, by serving his art with entire integrity, is at the same time rendering the greatest service he can to his own nation and to the world.
- T. S. Eliot, 'Yeats' (1940), On Poetry and Poets (1957), p. 262
- There are some poets whose poetry can be considered more or less in isolation, for experience and delight. There are others whose poetry, though giving equally experience and delight, has a larger historical importance. Yeats was one of the latter: he was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them. This is a very high position to assign him: but I believe that it is one which is secure.
- T. S. Eliot, 'Yeats' (1940), On Poetry and Poets (1957), p. 262
- When I went to college (from 1959 to 1963), there were no women's studies courses, no anthologies that stressed a female heritage, no public women's movement. Poetry meant Yeats, Lowell, James Dickey. Without even realizing it, I assumed that the voice of the poet had to be male.
- Erica Jong "Blood and Guts: The Tricky Problem of Being a Woman Writer in the Late Twentieth Century" in The Writer on Her Work edited by Janet Sternburg (2000)
- I read a lot of poetry. I keep up, as much as possible, with modern American poetry and I think that I'm very influenced by its rhythms. I like Walt Whitman, and I read all of Yeats a couple of months ago... I've read Galway Kinnell and Carolyn Kizer and Bob Hass, and some of the people who are sort of like poets but are prose writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick.
- 1980 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)
- anybody who works in this business knows that after almost any two pages you know that something is going wrong. Your work is going wrong at all times. I mean, that's why writing is really so hard-it's really, like Yeats said, something like digging a ditch. Except it's worse than digging a ditch, because when you dig it, you dig it and there it is, but with writing, you've dug that ditch and it's in the wrong place. So you really have to go off someplace and have to dig it over there.
- 1980 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)
- I think more of Yeats sometimes when I write than I do of anything else.
- 1986 interview in Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)
- I think that I just drew a lot of nourishment from the poets that I then was aware of and able to be aware of, poets like William Blake, like Emily Dickinson, like Whitman, people whose—and then later, somewhat later, Yeats, who taught me in fact that poetry could be political and still be incredibly beautiful. And on and on, because one is always reading, one is always extending one’s range into the world of poetry translated from other languages, poetry from other centuries. All of that has been very important to me.
- Adrienne Rich Interview with Democracy Now (1997)
- I was easily entranced by pure sound and still am, no matter what it is saying: and any poet who mixes the poetry of the actual world with the poetry of sound interests and excites me more than I am able to say. In my student years, it was Yeats who seemed to do this better than anyone else. There were lines of Yeats that were to ring in my head for years: "Many times man lives and dies/Between his two eternities,/That of race and that of soul,/And ancient Ireland knew it all..../Did she in touching that lone wing/Recall the years before her mind/Became a bitter, an abstract thing/Her thought some popular enmity:/Blind and leader of the blind/Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?" I could hazard the guess that all the most impassioned, seductive arguments against the artist's involvement in politics can be found in Yeats. It was this dialogue between art and politics that excited me in his work, along with the sound of his language-never his elaborate mythological systems. I know I learned two things from his poetry, and those two things were at war with each other. One was that poetry can root itself in politics. Even if it defends privilege, even if it deplores political rebellion and revolution, it can, may have to, account for itself politically, consciously situate itself amid political conditions, without sacrificing intensity of language. The other, that politics leads to "bitterness" and "abstractness" of mind. makes women shrill and hysterical, and is finally a waste of beauty and talent: "Too long a sacrifice / can make a stone of the heart." There was absolutely nothing in the literary canon I knew to counter the second idea. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's anti-slavery and feminist poetry, H.D.'s anti-war and woman-identified poetry, like the radical-yes, revolutionary-work of Langston Hughes and Muriel Rukeyser, were still buried by the academic literary canon. But the first idea was extremely important to me: a poet-one who was apparently certified-could actually write about political themes, could weave the names of political activists into a poem: "MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connally and Pearce/Now and in time to come/Wherever green is worn/Are changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born."
- Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)
- Barriers dissolve, too, when confronted by the Eastern poems: the poems of the sacred books, in Yeats' translation of the Upanishads, or Isherwood's of the Bhagavad-Gita, and such work as E. Powys Mathers' Black Marigolds and Robert Payne's The White Pony, a rich anthology of Chinese poetry.
- Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)
External links
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- Poems of William Butler Yeats
- Collected Poems at University of Adelaide
- Selected Poetry of W.B.Yeats
- 'Yeats' 'Leda and the swan': an images coming of age
- Yeats at Project Gutenberg
- Poetry by W.B. Yeats on Bibliomania
- Alphabetical Listing of Poems by Yeats
- Manuscript drafts from the National Library of Ireland's Yeats Collection