Irish poet (1865-1939)
Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
Do not think the fairies are always little. Everything is capricious about them, even their size. They seem to take what size or shape pleases them.
W. B. YEATS
Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
Though leaves are many, the root is one.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Coming of Wisdom with Time", The Green Helmet and Other Poems
I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge,
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self,
And, standing by these characters, disclose
All that I seek; and whisper it as though
He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud
Their momentary cries before it is dawn,
Would carry it away to blasphemous men.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Ego Dominus Tuus", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
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.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"All Soul's Night"
If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
They can hardly separate mere learning from witchcraft, and are fond of words and verses that keep half their secret to themselves.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who live with it.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Celtic Twilight
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.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Choice", The Winding Stair and Other Poems
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.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Countess Cathleen
Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Celtic Twilight
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Celtic Twilight
Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Byzantium", The Winding Stair and Other Poems
I had no natural gift for this clear quiet, as I soon discovered, for my mind is abnormally restless; and I was seldom delighted by that sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of oneself that one is merely imagining. I therefore invented a new process. I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams during sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of the confusion of dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or leaves.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Mundi", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
I had a conviction, which indeed I have still, that one's verses should hold, as in a mirror, the colours of one's own climate and scenery in their right proportion; and, when I found my verses too full of the reds and yellows Shelley gathered in Italy, I thought for two days of setting things right, not as I should now by making my rhythms faint and nervous and filling my images with a certain coldness, a certain wintry wildness, but by eating little and sleeping upon a board.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
The most celebrated fairy doctors are sometimes people the fairies loved and carried away, and kept with them for seven years; not that those the fairies love are always carried off--they may merely grow silent and strange, and take to lonely wanderings in the "gentle" places.
W. B. YEATS
"Witches, Fairy Doctors", Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
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?
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Second Coming"
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.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Never Give All the Heart", In the Seven Woods
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
speech on the Censorship of Films Bill, Jun. 7, 1923