William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeatswas an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth13 June 1865
CitySandymount, Ireland
CountryIreland
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick
Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.
The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.
And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey....
Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by