Humour and fantasy: ‘There is humour and fantasy as well as miraculous poetry in our old legends, and one can find in them all kinds of meanings. They will someday be the themes of poets and painters in many countries, and the substance of a new romantic movement [...]. They are the greatest treasure the past has handed down to us, Irish people [are] the most plentiful source of legends in Europe.’ (Letter to Standish Hayes O’Grady, 1898; Alan Wade, ed., Letters of W. B. Yeats, 1954, p.308.)

Wild beauty: ‘The Greeks looked within their borders, and we like them, have a history fuller than any modern history of imaginative events; and legends which surpass, as I think, all legends but theirs in wild beauty, and in our land, as in theirs there is no river or mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend [...] I would have our writers and craftsmen of many kinds master this history and these legends, and fix upon their memory the appearance of the mountains and rivers and make it all visible again in their art, so that Irishmen, even though they have gone thousands of miles away, would still be in their country.’ (Essays and Introductions, p.205-06; quoted [in part] in Fiona Macintosh, Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama, Cork UP 1994, p.10.)

“The Galway Plains”: ‘[...] I do not think these country imaginations have changed much for centuries, for they are still busy with those two themes of the ancient Irish poets, the sternness of battle and the sadness of parting and death. The emotion that in other countries has made many love-songs has here been given, in a long wooing, to danger, that ghostly bride. It is not a difference in the substance of things that the lamentations that were sung after battles are now sun for men who have died upon the gallows. [...]

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action [...] One could still, if one had the genius, and had been born to Irish, write for these people plays and poems like those of Greece. England or any other country which takes its tune from the great cities can gets its taste from schools and not from old custom may have a mob, but it cannot have a people.’ (‘The Galway Plains’, in Collected Prose, p.46; Essays and Introductions, pp.212-13.)

The Gaelic League: ‘Dr. Hyde and his [Gaelic] league [...] sought the peasant, and it is the peasant perhaps who prevails wherever Gaelic is taught, but we sought the peasant’s imagination, which presses beyond himself as if to the next stage.’ ( Explorations, Macmillan 1962, p.401; quoted in Edward Hirsch, ‘“Contention Is Better Than Loneliness”: The Poet as Folklorist’, in Ronald Schleifer, ed., The Genres of Irish Literary Revival, Wolfhound 1980, p.14.)

Peasant Memory: ‘The peasant remembers such songs and legends, all the more, it may be, because he has thought of little but cows and sheep and the like in his own marriage, for his dream has never been entangled by reality. The beauty of women is mirrored in his mind, as the excitement of the world is mirrored in the minds of children, and like them he thinks nothing but the best worth remembering.’ ("The Literary Movement in Ireland", in John P. Frayne & Colton Johnson, eds., Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats Volume II: Reviews, Articles and Other Miscellaneous Prose 1897-1939, London: Macmillan, 1975, p. 190.)

Folklore as religion?: ‘Folk-lore is at once the Bible, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer, and well-nigh all the great poets have lived by its light. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and even Dante, Goethe, and Keats, were little more than folk-lorists with musical tongues.’ (‘Message of the Folklorists’, 1893; also cited as ‘A Literary Causerie’, in Robert Welch, ed., Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth, Penguin 1993, p.17.)

Revival of Irish: ‘The recent revival of Irish literature has been very largely a folk-lore revival, an awakening of interest in the wisdom and ways of the poor, and in the poems and legends handed down among the cabins.’ (1894; Uncollected Prose, p.326; quoted in Edward Hirsch, ‘"Contention Is Better Than Loneliness": The Poet as Folklorist’, in Ronald Schleifer, ed., The Genres of Irish Literary Revival, Wolfhound 1980, pp.11ff.)

Collecting folklore with Lady Gregory: ‘Again and again, she and I felt that we had got down, as it were, into some fibrous darkness, into some matrix out of which everything has come, some condition that brought together as though into a single scheme "exultations, agonies", and the apparitions seen by dogs and horses; but there was always something lacking. We came upon visionaries of whom it was impossible to say whether they were Christian or Pagan, found memories of jugglers like those of India, found fragments of a belief that associated Eternity with field and road, not with buildings; but these visionaries, memories, fragments were eccentric, alien, shut off, as it were, under the plate glass of a museum.’

Ghosts [‘revenants’] & changelings: ‘It is not wonderful when one remembers this nearness of the dead to the living, that the country people should sometimes go on half-hoping for years, that their dead might walk in the door, as ruddy and warm as ever, but I think only half-living.’ (Quoted in Robert Welch, ed., W. B. Yeats: Writings on Irish Folklore, Penguin 1993, p.172; cited in Terence Brown, A Life of W. B. Yeats, 1999, p.20.)

More ghosts: ‘This substitution of the dead for the living is indeed a pagan mystery, and not more hard to understand than the substitution of the body and blood of Christ for the wafer and the wine in the mass; and I have not yet lost the belief that some day, in some village lost among the hills or in some island among the western seas, in some place that remembers the old ways and has not learned the new ways, I will come to understand how this pagan mystery hides and reveals some half-forgotten memory of an ancient knowledge or of an ancient wisdom.’ (Welch, op. cit., p.317; quoted in Brown, op. cit., p.21.)

Oral literature: ‘Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to be spoken or sung, while English literature, along of great literatures, because the newest of them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printing press. In Ireland to-day the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonisms is always present under some name or other in Irish imagination or intellect.’ (‘Literature and the Living Voice’; quoted in Denis Donoghue, ‘Another Complex Fate’, in We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society, California UP 1986, p.142.)

Ireland today: ‘In Ireland to-day the old world that sang and listened is, it may be for the last time in Europe, face to face with the world that reads and writes, and their antagonisms is always present under some name or other in Irish imagination or intellect.’ (‘Literature and the Living Voice’; quoted in Denis Donoghue, ‘Another Complex Fate’, in We Irish: Essays on Irish Literature and Society, California UP 1986, p.142.)

Note: Yeats viewed the Irish as a scattered race of twenty million ‘held together by songs’. (13 Aug. 1937, Letters to Dorothy Wellesley, p.157; quoted in Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats, NY: HarperCollins 1999, p.343.)