William Butler Yeats: Index of Quotations
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| Index | File 1 | File 2 | File 3 | File 4 | File 5 | File 6 | File 7 | File 8 | File 9 |
| [ 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 | Poetry |
[ 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. |
| Writings on William Blake | ||
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| Sligo days: ‘I have walked on Sinbad’s yellow shore and never shall another’s hit my fancy.’ (Reveries over Childhood and Youth[1914], in Autobiographies, 1955, [q.p.]; see longer extract - infra.) |
| File 2: Essays and Introductions | |
| The Works of William Blake (1893) The Poetry of William Blake (1910) “Old Gaelic Love Songs” (1893) “Irish Nation Literature” (1895) “Celtic Element in Literature” (1898) “Irish Literary Theatre” (1899) “The Lit. Movement in Ireland” (1901) “Modern Irish Poetry” (1904) “Poetry and Tradition” (1907) “Poetry in Ireland” (1908) |
“The Tragic Theatre” (1910) “Letter to The Irish Worker” (1913) ”If I Were Four and Twenty” (1919) Early Poems & Stories (1925) - Dedication Early Poems & Stories (1925) - Notes King of the Great Clock Tower (1935) Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) “General Intro. for My Work” (1935) “A Discussion of Style” (1936) “General Intro. to My Plays” (1937) |
| File 3: Self & Nation | ||
| His childhood The People The Peasant Irish Folklore Old wives’ tales Class & Caste |
Oral tradition Gaelic bards Irish oratory The Celts Imagination & Lit. Reason & Impulse |
Religion & Mythology Anglo-Irish Lit. Irish Nationalism Irish Movements The Abbey Theatre |
| See letter to Fr. Matthew Russell (ed. Irish Monthly) in 1889 on planning an Irish fiction anthology - infra. |
| File 4: Poetic Theories | ||
| Artist as Priest Mysticism & Magic Symbolism |
Supernaturalism Unity of Being Moods & Emotions |
Masks & Identity Irish Criticism Oedipus at the Abbey |
| File 5: Aesthetics & Credos | ||
| Dramatic Art Tragic or Creative Joy |
Literature & Sexuality Women & Dolls |
Idealism v. Realism Yeats’s Creed |
| File 6: The Matter of Ireland | ||
| Ireland in general Ireland, UK & US Irish nationality National feeling Irish bitterness Irish national faults |
English nationality Anglo-Ireland Nobel winner(s) Places & legends Irish tradition The Irish language |
[Irish] Catholicism Religion & Education The Penal Laws Psychic Research Divorce Bill (1929) Irish Censorship |
| File 7: History & Politics | ||
| Irish history Irish politics Irish names Irish writers Nationalists Republicans 1916 Rising The Great War |
Irish loyalty Class in Ireland Modern Ireland War in Ireland Fascism in Europe Fascism in Ireland The Irish future Northern Ireland |
National cultures National histories English Royals Civil pension Literary gunmen The Irish coinage Condolence (letter) |
| For letter of April 1928 to Sean O’Casey rejecting The Silver Tassie, see under O’Casey - supra. |
| File 8: Major Literary Figures | ||
| Wm. Shakespeare Jonathan Swift |
George Berkeley Edmund Burke |
William Blake |
| File 9: A Vision & On the Boiler | ||
| John Sherman (1891) |
The Countess Kathleen |
The Celtic Twilight (1893) |
| Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) | Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902) | The King’s Threshold |
| Resurrection (1934) | A Vision (1925, rev. edn. 1937) | On the Boiler (1939) |
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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 O’Donnell, 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.) |
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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.) |
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| Neitszche &c.: ‘I don’t 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. |
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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.) |
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| A Seminar Selection of Poems by W. B. Yeats |
| The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1955) | ||||||||||||
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For Annotations, see ...
| Notes on the Collected Poems (1950) | ||||||
| File 1 | File 2 | File 3 | File 4 | File 5 | File 6 | |
| Index & General |
Collections 1888-1913 |
Collections 1914-1928 |
Collections 1929-1932 |
Collections 1935-1939 |
Plays & Prose 1885-1925 |
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