William Butler Yeats: Index of Quotations
[ The contents of each of the above files are listed in the General Index on this page. By reason of design and volume, access to the poetry is listed lower down than the prose. ] |
Prose
[ For a selection of shorter prose quotations - see infra. ]
See longer extracts and full-text copies in RICORSO Library > Irish Classics > W. B. Yeats - via index. |
W. B. Yeats, ed. & annot., A Book of Irish Verse: Selected from Modern Writers with an Introduction [Modern Irish Poetry] (London: Methuen 1895), 275pp., is available in the 1900 Edn. at Gutenberg - online; accessed 30 Jan. 2023. |
[ Internet access: A Vision [B] (1937) is available at Internet Archive - online; accessed 27.11.2024. ] |
Writings on William Blake |
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Sligo days: I have walked on Sinbads yellow shore and never shall anothers hit my fancy. (Reveries over Childhood and Youth [1914], in Autobiographies, 1955, [q.p.]; see longer extract - infra.) |
Per Amica Silentia Lunae (London: Macmillan 1918) - see extract - infra. |
See letter to Fr. Matthew Russell (ed. Irish Monthly) in 1889 on planning an Irish fiction anthology - infra. |
For letter of April 1928 to Sean OCasey rejecting The Silver Tassie, see under OCasey - supra.
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Some shorter quotations |
Irish poetry: [I am] A man of my time, through my poetical faculty living its history. (Later Essays, ed. William ODonnell, p.198; quoted in Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Yeats and Gender, in The Oxford Companion to W. B. Yeats, ed. Marjorie Howes & John Kelly, OUP 2006, p.169. |
My first principle in my work is that poetry must make the land in which we live a holy land as Homer made Greece. (1897; quoted in Edna Longley, Letter from Belfast, Times Literary Supplement, 12 Dec. 2002, p.15.) |
I feel more and more that we shall have a school of Irish poetry - founded on Irish myth and history - a neo-romantic movement. (Letters to Katherine Tynan, 1887, in Allan Wade, ed., Letters, 1954, p.33.) Further: Any breath from Ireland blows pleasurably in this hateful London where you cannot go five paces without seeing some wretched object broken either by wealth or poverty. (Ibid., p.35.) |
I must leave my sights and images to explain themselves as the years go by, and one poem lights up another. (Preface to Poems, 1899; quoted in T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats, London: Methuen 1965 [rev. edn.], p.126.)
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Somebody has said that all sound philosophy is but biography and what I myself did, getting into an original relation to Irish life, creating in myself a new character, a new pose - in the French sense of the word - the literary mind of Ireland must do as a whole, always understanding that the result must be no bundle of formulas, not faggots but a fire. (Explorations, pp.235-36; quoted in Denis Donoghue, Yeats [Fontana Modern Masters], Collins 1971, p.96.) |
Irish drama: For Yeats, the playwrights of Catholic Ireland were dominated by their subject while those of Anglo-Irish background stand above their subject and play with it. (The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Wade, London: Hart-Davis 1954, p.464; quoted in Thomas Kilroy, A Generation of Playwrights, in Irish University Review, Spring 1992, p.135.)
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Neitszche &c.: I dont know how to thank you too much for the three volumes of Nietzsche. I had never read him before, but find that I had come to the same conclusions on several cardinal matters. He is exaggerated and violent but has helped me very greatly to build up in my mind an imagination of the heroic life. (Letter to John Quinn, 6 Feb. [1903], Coll: Foster-Murphy. Quoted in William Michael Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839-1922) (Cornell UP 1978), Notes to pp.264-266; p.596. |
Politics growing heroic [...] A Fascist opposition is forming behind the scenes to be ready should some tragic situation develop. I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end to our troubles. (Let this sleep in your ear.) (WBY to Olivia Shakespeare, 13 July 1933; Wade, pp.811-12; quoted in Brenda Maddox, Yeatss Ghosts [..&c], NY: HarperCollins 1999, p.271.)
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Kissing the void: Science is the criticism of Myths, there would be no Darwin had there been no Book of Genesis ... and when the criticism is finished there is not even a drift of ashes on the pyre. Sexual desire dies because every touch consumes the myth, and yet a myth that cannot be so consumed becomes a spectre. I am reading William Morris with great delight and what a protection to my delight it is to know that spite of all his loose writing I need not be jealous for him. He is the end as Chaucer was the end in his day, Dante in his, incoherent Blake in his. There is no improvement, only a series of sudden fires, each though fainter as necessary as that before it. We free ourselves from obsession that we may be nothing. The last kiss is given the void. (Letters, ed. Wade, London, p.404; quoted in Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, London: Faber 1954, p.234.) |
I know for certain that my time will not be long [...] I am happy, and I think full of an energy, of an energy I had despaired of. It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence. (Letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham, 4 January 1939; in Letters, ed. Allan Wade, London Rupert-Hart Davis 1954, p.922; InteLex 7632.)
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Poetry
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1955) |
An index to the poems as held and viewable in RICORSO is available at these links |
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Editorial note: The scale and frequency of quotations from W. B. Yeats in Irish critical commentary on him and other writers is such that I have not devoted a file or files to him on the Authors A-Z section of this website. Instead, the complete poetical works are held in the RICORSO Library of Irish Classics [infra]- taking the edition by Richard Finneran as copy-text arranged alphabetically by title as it was (or was) in the Toronto Univ. Librarys digital archive in c.1996. This enables the RICORSO user to search the entirety of that collection in a single file - which is 576KB and therefore slow to download - or in a series of smaller files, likewise in alphabetical order, as shown in the index which provides links to each of these - as infra [in this frame] or as attached [in a separate window]. |
BS / Oct. 2024 |
Oil and Blood (1929) |
In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet. |
But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.
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For Annotations, see ...
Notes on the Collected Poems (1950) |
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File 5 |
File 6 |
Index
& General
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Collections
1888-1913 |
Collections
1914-1928 |
Collections
1929-1932 |
Collections
1935-1939 |
Plays & Prose
1885-1925 |
The record of biographical, bibliographical and critical information concerning each poem in the Collected Poems (Macmillan 1950 & edns.) which is supplied in this section has been largely transcribed from A. N. Jeffares, A New Commentary to the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Macmillan 1988). |
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