W. B. Yeats: Some Topical Quotations

Childhood	Religion	Celts	The People	England
Mythology	Magic	Masks	Women	Modernity

See further extracts on language and literature - infra.

Childhood
‘The English boys at my school thought of Agincourt and Crécy and the Union Jack and were all very patriotic and I without those memories of Limerick and the Yellow Ford that would have strengthened an Irish Catholic thought of mountain and lake, of my grandfather and of ships.’ (Autobiographies, 1955, p.35; quoted in Lord Longford [Frank Pakenham], Five Lives, 1964.)

‘When I was a child I had only to climb the hills behind the house to see long, blue, ragged hills flowing along the southern horizon. What beauty was lost to me, what depth of emotion is still perhaps lacking to me, because nobody told me, not even merchant captain who knew everything, that Cruachan of the Enchantments lay behind those long, blue, ragged hills!’ (Preface to Lady Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, London 1903; cited in John Frayne, ed, Uncollected Prose, Vol. I, 1970, Pref. p.47, n.39.)

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Religion
‘I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, an almost infallible church, of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help form philosophers and theologians’; [on ‘my unshakeable belief’:] ‘I thought whatever of philosophy has been made poetry alone is permanent’; ‘I might have found more of Ireland if I had written in Irish, but I have found a little, and I have found all myself.’ (Autobiographies, p.27.)

‘I believe that the renewal of belief which is the great movement of our time will more and more liberate the arts from “their age” and from life, and leave them more and more free to lose themselves in beauty, and to busy themselves, like all the great poetry of the past and like religions of all times, with old “faiths, myths, dreams” the accumulated beauty of the age. I believe that all will more and more reject the opinion that poetry is a “criticism of life” and be more and more convinced that it is a revelation of hidden life, and that they may even come to think “painting, poetry, and music” the only means of conversing with eternity left to man on earth.’ ( ‘Literary Ideals in Ireland’, 1899, p.36; reprinted in Mark Storey, Poetry and Ireland, 1988.)

‘The only two powers that trouble the deeps are religion and love, the others make a little trouble on the surface’ (Qited in Louis MacNeice, W. B. Yeats, 1941.)

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Celts
‘[I]t is only the Celt who cares much for ideas which have no immediate practical bearing. At least Matthew Arnold said so, and I think he is right, for the flood-gates of materialism are only half-open among us as yet here in Ireland; perhaps the new age may close them before the tide is quite upon us. […] I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstances, or passionless fantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions and beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Slavonic, the Finnish, the Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to the man river of European literature.’ (‘Nationality and Literature’, in United Ireland, 27 May, 1893.) rep. in Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose, 1970, pp.267-75; p.268.)

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The People
‘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’, Collected Prose, p.46; Essays and Introductions, p.213.)

‘I have noticed that clairvoyance, prevision, and allied gifts, rare among the educated classes, are common among peasants. Among those peasants there is much of Asia, where Hegel has said every civilisation begins. Yet we much hold to what we have that the next civilisation may be born, not from a virgin’s womb, not a tomb without a body, not from a void, but of our own rich experience.’ (‘Private Thoughts’, in Essays and Introduction, p.436-37.)

‘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.)

‘[O]ur movement is a return to the people [...] if you would ennoble a man of the roads you must write about the man of the roads, or about the people of romance, or about great historical people.’ (Samhain, 1902; Explorations, 1962, p.96; cited in Una Kealy, ‘The Return of Radical Innocence in the Plays of W. B. Yeats’ [UUC MA 1999], p.29.)

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England
‘In a battle like Ireland’s, which is one of poverty against wealth, we must prove our sincerity by making ourselves unpopular to wealth. We must accept the baptism of the gutter.’ (Dramatis Personae, 1902; Autobiographies, p.410.)

‘We have all something within ourselves to batter down and get our power from this fighting. I have never “produced” a play in verse without showing the actors that the passion of the verse comes from the fact that the speakers are holding down violence or madness - “down, Hysterica passio”. All depends on the completeness of the holding down, on the stirring of the beast underneath.' (Letters to Dorothy Wellesley, 1940, pp.94-5

[Quoted in Richard Ellmann, The Man and the Masks, 1948, p.141; at greater length in Jeffares, New Commentary, Macmillan 1984, p.343 & pp.383-83; also in Daniel Albright, Poems, 1992, p.786 [notes on “Proud Furies”] and Brenda Maddox, Yeats's Ghosts, HarperCollins 1999, p.29].)

‘No Irish voice […] been lifted up in praise of that imperialism which […] a mere painted and [flaunting] materialism; because Ireland has taken sides forever with the poor in spirit who shall inherit the earth.’ (‘The Union of the Gael in ‘98’, Centennial Assoc. of Great Britain and France, Report of Speeches, Dublin 1898; cited in Cullingford, p.24.

‘To transmute the anti-English passion into a passion of hatred against the vulgarity and materialism wheron England has founded her worst life and the whole life that she sends us, has always been a dream of mine. (Dramatis Personae, pp.49-50.)

‘We must keep propaganda out of our blood because three important persons know nothing of it - a man modelling a statue, a man playing a flute, and a man in a woman’s arms.’ (Preface, Oxford Book of Modern Verse.)

‘I am convinced that in two or three generations it will become generally known that the mechanical theory has no reality, that the natural and supernatural are knit together [...] Europeans may find something attractive in a Christ posed against a background not of Judaism but of Druidism.’ (Essays and Introductions, p.518.)

‘There is in the creative joy an acceptance of what life brings, because we have understood the beauty of what it brings, or a hatred of death for what it takes away, which arouses within us, through some sympathy perhaps with all other men, an energy so noble, so powerful, that we laugh aloud and mock, in the terror or the sweetness of our exaltation, at death and oblivion.’ (Essays and Introductions, 1960, p.322.)

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Mythology
‘Nations, races, and individual men are unified by an image, or a bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind which is, of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that race or nation; because only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity’ (Autobiographies, 1955 &c., pp.193-94.)

‘I began to pray that my imagination might somehow be rescue from abstraction and become as preoccupied with life as had been the imagination of Chaucer. [...] A conviction that the world was now a bundle of fragments possessed me without ceasing.’ (Idem.)

‘Might I not create some new Prometheus Unbound, Patrick or Columcille, Oisin or Finn, in Prometheus’ stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cor-Patrick, or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from mythology that marries them to rock and hill? (Autobiographies, 1950, p.188-89.)

I delighted in every age where poet and artist confined themselves gladly to some inherited subject-matter known to the whole people, for I thought that in man and race alike there is something called “Unity of Being”, using that term as Dante used it when he compared beauty in the Convivio to a perfectly proportioned human body [...] I thought that the enemy of this unity was abstraction, meaning by abstraction not the distinction but the isolation of occupation’ (Ibid., p.190.)

‘Had not Europe shared one mind and heart, until both mind and heart began to break into fragments a little before Shakespeare’s birth? Music and verse began to fall apart when Chaucer robbed verse of its speed that he might give it greater meditation [...] painting parted from religion in the later Renaissance that it might stufy effects of tangibility undisturbed [...] Descartes discovered that he could think better in his bed than out of it; nor needed I original thought to discover, being so late of the school of Morris, that machinery had not separated from handicraft wholly for the world’s good [...].’ (Ibid., p.191.)

‘As you know all my art theories depend upon just this - rooting of mythology in the earth.’ (Letter to Sturge Moore, 1927; quoted in E. Engelberg, The Vast Design: Patterns in Yeats’s Aesthetic, CUA Press Edn. 1988, p.34.)

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Magic
‘[N]ext to my poetry the most important pursuit of my life [...] [is mysticism]. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.’ (Letter to John O’Leary; July 1892; printed in Wade; cited in Seamus Deane, reviewing Kelly, Letters, Vol. 1, 1989, in TLS, 7 March 1986, p.236-7.)

‘I believe that the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. That the borders of our memories are as ever shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.’ (‘Magic’ [1901], Essays and Introductions, p.28.)

‘Only when we have put ourselves in all the positions of life, from the most miserable to those that are so lofty that we call only speak of them in symbols and in mysteries will entire wisdom be possible.’ (Samhain, No. 3 Sept. 1903), pp.30-31.)

‘[M]etaphors are not profound enough to be moving, when they are not symbols, and when they are symbols they are the most perfect of all, because the most subtle, outside of pure sound, and through them on can best find out what symbols are. All sounds, all colours, all forms [...] call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions [...] an emotion does not exist till it has found its expression, in colour or in sound or in form.’ (‘Symbolism’, Selected Criticism, ed. Jeffares, p.81.)

‘On the afternoon of October 14th, 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing [...] so exciting, so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or so a day to the unknown writer, and after some half-dozen of such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences. “No”, was the answer, “we have come to give you metaphors for poetry”.’ (Letters, ed. Wade, 1954, p.613; cited in Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal, 1977, p.140.

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Masks
‘As all realisation is through opposites, men coming to believe the subjective opposite of what they do and think, we may be about to accept the most implacable authority the world has known. Do I desire it or dread it, loving as I do the gaming table of Nature where many are ruined but none is judged, and where all is fortuitous, unforeseen?’ (“If I were Four and Twenty”, pp.4-5, 20-21; quoted in T. R. Whitaker, Swan and Shadow, 1989 [Edn.], p.72.)

‘Among subjective men (in all those, that is, who must spin a web out of their own bowels) the victory is an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches away, and so that fate’s antithesis; while what I have called ‘the mask’ is an emotional antithesis to all that comes out of their [subjective men] internal nature. We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy. (Autobiographies., p.189.)

‘I think that all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other self; that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself, something which has no memory and is created in a moment and perpetually renewed. We put on a grotesque or solemn pained face to hide us from the terrors of judgement, invent an imaginative Saturnalia where one forgets reality, a game like that of a child, where one loses the infinite pain of self-realisation. Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but its flights from an infinite blinding beam’; further, (Diary of 1908; ‘The Death of Synge’, in Autobiographies, p.503.)

‘I had set out on life with the thought of putting my very self into poetry [...] I thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle of my own mind and body [...] Then one day I understood quite suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its hand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more did I follow the opposite of myself.’ (Essays and Introductions, p.271.)

‘The poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment, the hero in defeat. The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.’ (Mythologies, p.337.) [See further quotations on Yeats’s ideas about Masks and Identity - infra.]

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Women
‘Women, because the main event of their lives has been a giving themselves and giving birth, give all to an opinion as if it were some terrible stone doll [...] to women opinions become as their children or their sweethearts, and the greater their emotional capacity the more do they forget all other things. They grow cruel, as if in defence of lover or child, and all this is done for "something other than human life. At last the opinion is so much identified with their nature that it seems a part of their flesh becomes stone and passes out of life. [...] Women should have their play with dolls finished in childish happiness, for if they play with them again it is amid hatred and malice.’ (Diary, 1910; cited in Louis McNeice, W. B. Yeats, 1941, p.118; also A. N. Jeffares, New Commentary, 1984, p.207.) Cf. “The Death of Synge”, in Autobiographies, p.504f.)

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Modernity
‘My experience of Ireland, during the last three years [1919-22], has changed my views very greatly, & now I feel that the work of an Irish man of letters must be not so much to awaken or quicken or preserve the national idea among the mass of the people but to convert the educated classes to it on the one hand to the best of his ability, & on the other - & this is the more important - to fight for moderation, dignity, and the rights of the intellect among his fellow nationalists. Ireland is terribly demoralised in all things - in her scholourship [sic], in her criticism, in her politics, in her social life. She will never be greatly better until she governs herself but she will be greatly worse unless there arise protesting spirits. I am doing what I can be writing my books with laborious care & studied moderation of style [...]’ (Letters, I, p.399; quoted G. F. Watson, Intro., W. B. Yeats, Short Fiction, Penguin 1995, p.xii.)

‘When I stand on O’Connell Bridge in the half light and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark and I am certain that wherever in Europe there are minds strong enough to lead others the same vague hatred will have issued in violence and imposed some kind of rule of kindred. I cannot know the nature of that rule, for its opposite fills the light; all I can do to bring it nearer is to intensify my hatred. I am no Nationalist except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of the intellect, and when you consider what comes before or after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet’ (from “General Introduction for my Work”; quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s essay ‘Passion and Cunning’, in Jeffares, ed., In Excited Reverie, 1965.)

‘[O]n behalf of that small Protestant band which had so often proved itself the chivalry of Ireland [...] I think it tragic that within three years of this country gaining independence we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation considers to be grossly oppressive. I am proud to consider myself a typical man of that minority. We against whom you have done this thing are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan, we are the people of Swift, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence. Yet I do not altogether regret what has happened. I shall be able to find out, if not I, my children will be able to find out whether we have lost our stamina or not. You have defined our position and given us a popular following. If we have not lost ouor stamina then your victory will be brief, and your defeat final, and when it comes this nation may be transformed.’ (Speech of 11 June, 1925, in Senates Speeches, p.99; cited in part in Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.188; and more extensively in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Mask, 1948, pp.252-53; also cited in Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal, 1977, p.250.)