Yeats Famous Quotes

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. A girl arose that had red mournful lips And seemed the greatness of the world in tears, Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships And proud as Priam murdered with his peers; Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.

HIS chosen comrades thought at school He must grow a famous man; He thought the same and lived by rule, All his twenties crammed with toil; 'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?' Everything he wrote was read, After certain years he won Sufficient money for his need, Friends that have been friends indeed; 'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. ' What then?' All his happier dreams came true -- A small old house, wife, daughter, son, Grounds where plum and cabbage grew, poets and Wits about him drew; 'What then.?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?' The work is done,' grown old he thought, 'According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought'; But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of 'The Golden Age,' Barry Pain, now a well known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and Oscar Wilde, who was some eight years or ten older than the rest.

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . .(from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124).

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of The Golden Age, Barry Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than the rest of us.

When the aged countrywoman stands at her door in the evening and, in her own words, 'looks at the mountains and thinks of the goodness of God,' God is all the nearer because the pagan powers are not far: because northward in Ben Bulben, famous for hawks, the white square door swings open at sundown, and those wild unchristian riders rush forth upon the fields, while southward the White Lady, who is doubtless Maive herself, wanders under the broad cloud nightcap of Knocknarea.

You think there's something materialistic about collecting books, but really collectors are the last romantics. We're the only ones who still love books as objects." "That's the question," said Jess. "How do you love them if you're always selling them?" "I don't sell everything," he said. "You haven't seen my own collection." "What do you have?" "First editions. Yeats, Dickinson- all three volumes; Eliot, Pound, Millay..." He had noticed the books she read in the store. "Plath. I also have Elizabeth Bishop." "I wish I could see them," Jess said. "You would have come to my house." "Are you inviting me?" She must have known this was a loaded question, but she asked without flirtatiousness or self-consciousness, as if to say, I only want to know as a point of information. Yes, he thought, I'm inviting you, but he did not say yes. He was her employer. She could act with a certain plucky independence, but he would always be the big bad wolf.

The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes. The process of upset resulting from a new distribution of skills is accompanied by much culture lag in which people feel compelled to look at new situations as if they were old ones, and come up with ideas of “population explosion” in an age of implosion. Newton, in an age of clocks, managed to present the physical universe in the image of a clock. But poets like Blake were far ahead of Newton in their response to the challenge of the clock. Blake spoke of the need to be delivered “from single vision and Newton’s sleep,” knowing very well that Newton’s response to the challenge of the new mechanism was itself merely a mechanical repetition of the challenge. Blake saw Newton and Locke and others as hypnotized Narcissus types quite unable to meet the challenge of mechanism. W. B. Yeats gave the full Blakean version of Newton and Locke in a famous epigram: Locke sank into a swoon; The garden died; God took the spinning jenny Out of his side. Yeats presents Locke, the philosopher of mechanical and lineal associationism, as hypnotized by his own image. The “garden,” or unified consciousness, ended. Eighteenth century man got an extension of himself in the form of the spinning machine that Yeats endows with its full sexual significance. Woman, herself, is thus seen as a technological extension of man’s being.

Ezra Pound famously said that culture begins when you forget what book that came from. Unfortunately he himself never forgot any citation that suited his mania, and his work as a totality is hopelessly vitiated by the half-witted diligence of the trainspotter. An edifying comparison can be made with Yeats, whose allegiance to the spiritualist claptrap of the theory of the Mystic Rose was at least as batty as Pound’s to the pseudo-economic quackery of the theory of Social Credit: but Yeats could develop beyond his early lyrics because art, for him, was a system of solid knowledge by far transcending his own fads.

The poet W. B. Yeats wrote the famous line: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” I would suggest that the problem is not that the center cannot hold, but that humans are unaware of the center, unaware of their innermost essence, which is the spiritual dimension of life.

William Butler Yeats is considered one of the most seminal English language poets of the 20th Century. Perhaps his most famous poem, The Second Coming, he penned in 1921. The themes he touches on