25 Famous Quotes by William Butler Yeats
6/13/1865 - 1/28/1939
Also Known As:
W.B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats
W. B. (William Butler) Yeats
Professions:
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About William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower and The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Yeats was a very good friend of American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate Ezra Pound. Yeats wrote the introduction for Gitanjali, which was about to be published by the India Society.
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin, but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889 and those slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least
interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead.
Study
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats , Source: The Letters of W .B. Yeats
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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.
Perfection
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats
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Things fall apart; the center 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
Anarchy
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats
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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.
Anarchy
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats
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The land of fairy, where nobody gets old and godly and grave, where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
Fairies
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats
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Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.
Temptation
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats
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We . . . are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of
Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the
people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature
of this country. We have created the best of its political
intelligence.
Ireland
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats , Source: in a speech in the Irish Senate, June 11, 1925
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Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
Art
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats
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A DEEP-SWORN VOW
Others because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.
Absence
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats
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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.
Love
Quotes, by William Butler Yeats
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