|
William Butler Yeats: Index of Quotations
| [ The contents of each of the above files are listed in the General Index - as below ] |
| See longer extracts and full-text versions in RICORSO Library > Irish Classics > W. B. Yeats - index. |
| Note: Only prose quotations from the writings of W. B. Yeats are given here (under the “Authors” in RICORSO). His poetry is available in the copy-edition Collected Poems at RICORSO > Library > “Irish Classics” > W. B. Yeats - via index or in a separate window.
|
| The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1955) |
|
|
[ For some shorter quotations, see infra ... ]
General Index of Yeats Quotations
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.
| Sligo days: ‘I have walked on Sinbad’s yellow shore and never shall an-other’s hit my fancy.’ (Reveries over Childhood and Youth[1914], in Autobiographies, 1955, [q.p.]; see longer extract - infra.) |
| File 2: Essays and Introductions |
|
|
| 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 O’Casey rejecting The Silver Tassie, see under O’Casey - supra.
|
See also ...
| 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 |
[ top ]
Some shorter quotations
| ‘[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.’ - ‘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.’ Letters to Katherine Tynan, 1887, in Allan Wade, ed., Letters, 1954, pp. 33 & 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.)
|
| ‘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, Yeats’s Ghosts[..&c], NY: HarperCollins 1999, p.271.) |
‘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.)
|
| 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; cited in Thomas Kilroy, ‘A Generation of Playwrights’, in Irish University Review, Spring 1992, p.135.) |
Superman: ‘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.
|
|
