William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist respected by many the greatest poet of the 20th century. He won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature and was the leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance.
Born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish family, Yeats studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where, with his fellow student, the Irish writer George William Russell, he developed an interest in mystical religion and the supernatural. At 21, he abandoned art in favor of literature, wrote novels, and edited poems.
Yeats founded the Irish Literary Society in London in 1891 and another in Dublin in 1892. He then applied himself to the creation of an Irish national theatre. In London, Yeats met the great, unrequited love of his life, the nationalist-activist Maud Gonne. He wrote several plays for her, like The Countess Kathleen (1892) and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902,) in which Gonne played the title character who personified Ireland and became a rallying figure in the Irish independence movement.
Some of Yeats’s most famous poems are “Easter, 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Yeats’s poems simultaneously dramatize and ironize the allure of escape from the burdens of modern living. Other famous poems explored his hopeless love for Gonne.
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I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Censorship
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Dance
The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Motivation
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Imagination
True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Love
Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.
—William Butler Yeats
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Preparation, Planning
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Perfection
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Growth, Happiness
From our birthday, until we die, is but the winking of an eye.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Birthdays
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