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 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 think a man and a woman should choose each other for life, for the simple reason that a long life with all its accidents is barely enough for a man and a woman to understand each other; and in this case to understand is to love.
we can make our minds so still like water. That beings gather about us to see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even with a fiercer life because of silence.
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,Amid the rustle of his planted hills,Life overflows without ambitious pains;And rains down life until the basin spills,And mounts more dizzy high the more it rainsAs though to choose whatever shape it wills. . . .
Civilization is hoped together, brought under a rule, under the semblance of peace by manifold illusion, but Man's life is thought, and he, despite his terror, cannot cease, ravening through century after century ravening, raging and uprooting, that
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
What can be explained is not poetry.
In dreams begins responsibility.
yet it seems Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind, Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams, But the torn petals strew the garden plot; And there's but common greenness after that.
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.