W.B. Yeats
Greatest English-language poet of the 20th century
Most quoted
"Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire?"
— from No Second Troy, 1916
"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 Emmet, the people of O'Connell, the people of Charles Stewart Parnell."
— from Speech, 1922
"Things said or done long years ago, / Or things I did not do or say / But thought that I might say or do, / Weigh me down, and not a day / But something is recalled, / My conscience or my vanity appalled."
— from Vacillation, 1933
All quotes by W.B. Yeats (350)
Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
The years like great black oxen tread the world, / And God the herdsman goads them on behind, / And I am broken by their passing feet.
Think where man's glory most begins and ends, / And say my glory was I had such friends.
An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress,
That is no country for old men. The young / In one another's arms, birds in the trees
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Labour is blossoming or dancing where / The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
The intellect of man is forced to choose / perfection of the life, or of the work,
I must lie down where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
The light of evening, Lissadell, / Great windows open to the south,
The innocent and the beautiful / Have no enemy but time;
Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!
Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?
Things said or done long years ago, / Or things I did not do or say / But thought that I might say or do, / Weigh me down, and not a day / But something is recalled, / My conscience or my vanity appalled.
I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.
The fascination of what's difficult / Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent / Spontaneous joy and natural content / Out of my heart.
I balanced all, brought all to mind, / The years to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind / In balance with this life, this death.
A lonely impulse of delight / Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
Contemporaries of W.B. Yeats
Other Literatures born within 50 years of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939).