Quotes About Yeats

I do think culture is an argument, and that was part of the way I was brought up. People at a social occasion in Ireland will start shouting and arguing. When the Yeats family lived in Bedford Park, they had to go round to the neighbours to say, 'You might think we are fighting, but this is the way we talk to each other.'

The poet Yeats felt we were living in the last of a great Christian cycle. His poem "The Second Coming" says, "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.

We had fed the heart on fantasies. / The heart's grown brutal from the fare." From "Meditations in Time of Civil War," 1923.W.B.Yeats

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.

For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.

Fifteen apparitions have I seen;The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.

If there's no hatred in a mindAssault and battery of the windCan never tear the linnet from the leaf.

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways.

My wretched dragon is perplexed.

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake There's many a one shall find out all heartache On finding that her voice is sweet and low Replied, 'To be born a woman is to know- Although they do not talk of it at school - That we must labor to be beautiful.

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.

My wretched dragon is perplexed.

I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

Even the wisest man grows tense/with some sort of violence/before he can accomplish fate,/know his work or choose his mate.

When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.

Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell And many a lesser bell sound through the room; And it is All Soul's Night, And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come; For it is a ghost's right, His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

Bryn?" Chase's voice was a whisper in my mind, and the sensation sent a single chill up my spine. "Yes?" "You asked me what I liked, before." He paused, and all the silence tickled my mind, the chill in my spine climbing its way to the hairs on the back of my neck. "Before, I loved cars, Yeats, having a bedroom that locked from the inside, and you.