Irish poet (1865-1939)
God spreads the heavens above us like great wings,
And gives a little round of deeds and days.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
The Land of Heart's Desire
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Frederick J. Gregg, summer, 1886
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
letter to Olivia Shakespear, Mar. 24, 1927
A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"The Pity of Love", The Rose
No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
Come away, O human child!
To the woods and waters wild
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
W. B. YEATS
"The Stolen Child", Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"A Prayer for Old Age", A Full Moon in March
I had thought for no one's but your ears;
That you were beautiful and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary hearted as that hollow moon.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Adam's Curse", In the Seven Woods
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Sailing to Byzantium", The Tower
Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word -- ecstasy.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Anima Hominis", Per Amica Silentia Lunae
Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil