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
I would be -- for no knowledge is worth a straw --Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
I have certainly 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
I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe it is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swing his lantern higher.
May she be granted beauty and yet notBeauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,Being made beautiful overmuch,Consider beauty a sufficient end,Lose natural kindness and maybeThe heart-revealing intimacyThat chooses right, and never find a friend.
May God be praised for womanThat gives up all her mind,A man may find in no mana friendship of her kind.
My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,And open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.
Of conflicts with others we make retorica, of conflicts with ourselves poetry
I'd as soon listen to dried peas in a bladder, as listen to your thoughts.
I am content to live it all againAnd yet again, if it be life to pitchInto the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,A blind man battering blind men.
I bear a burden that might well tryMen that do all by rule,And what can IThat am a wandering-witted foolBut pray to God that He easeMy great responsibilities?
Cast a cold eyeOn life, on deathHorseman, pass by!
Caught in that sensual music all neglect monuments of unaging intellect
Because of that great nobleness of hersThe fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,Burns but more clearly.
No expectation fails there,No pleasing habit ends,No man grows old, no girl grows cold,But friends walk by friends.