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William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939), popularly known as W B Yeats in short, was an Irish poet, writer, and dramatist. He was one of the foremost literary figures of 20th-century literature, and a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. He also served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.

Wisdom & Quotes

  • Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
- The Second Coming
  • And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- The Second Coming
  • The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- The Second Coming
  • All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
- Easter 1916
  • Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
- Easter 1916
  • The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away.
- The Land of Heart's Desire
  • Now that y ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
- The Circus Animals' Desertion
  • I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
- The Lake Isle of Innisfree
  • Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
- Responsibilities, preliminary poem
  • A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love.
- The Pity of Love
  • When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read.
- When You Are Old
  • How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
- When You Are Old
  • And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
- The Song of the Wandering Aengus
  • When shall the stars be blown about the sky,
Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?
- The Secret Rose
  • The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
- The Countess Cathleen

Herbert George Wells

Page last modified on Saturday October 8, 2022 11:42:47 GMT-0000