Quotes About Yeats

I drifted into acting. My grandfather had a house in Buffalo in which there was a stage, and his friends met every two weeks or so to put on plays. So it was natural for me to put on plays, too, when I went to boarding school. I put on everything in the drama - I was indiscriminate. I put on Yeats and Shaw and Lady Gregory.

In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate.

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

In dreams begin responsibilities," as the poet Yeats said,

When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a cean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society. If not, as Yeats warned, "...the centre can not hold.

Or reading poetry. Now there was a job that should exist. To spend one's days in the company of Blake and Dickinson, Yeats and Hopkins, Auden and Milton. To fill one's mind with their wisdom, the music of their words. Today

I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

Few in the Nineties would have ventured to prophesy that the remote dim singer of the Celtic Twilight would, in a new age, become the leading poet of the English-speaking world. None have disputed the claim of William Butler Yeats to that title.

The experience of being in the Army changed my whole life; I never believed that an organization such as ours could ever go to war, leave alone win it. It was, as Yeats remarked of the Easter Rising, 'A terrible beauty.'

. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death

She says the clogs are comfortable, and that comfort trumps fashion as far as she's concerned. Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds Ã¢â'¬â€œ who used to be a passionate Yeats fan Ã¢â'¬â€œ is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different, and in actual fact Yeats is dead. Reynolds

Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds--who used to be a passionate Yeats fan--is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different then, and in actual fact Yeats is dead.

Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.'

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.

aunque en realidad sería más exacto decir que más bien ha sido el mundo el que ha ido quemando etapas y viajando directo hacia su grandioso final y funeral, ya anunciado por esos versos de Yeats

I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.

Purpose? Hope? None of these words seemed right. Then I thought of a line from William Butler Yeats. "Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.