Yeats – Quotes

One day in Dipstick,

One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante’s plastic Paradiso, or Yeats’s gold-plated Byzantium. Edward Abbey

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet’s language at that point in history, and so it’s even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that. Diane Wakoski

The sad fact is

The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t … Read more

… woman is frequently

… woman is frequently praised as the more creative sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium…. To call a child a poem may be a pretty … Read more

To be the father

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase ‘terrible beauty.’ Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes … Read more

But I liked Yeats!

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. Chinua … Read more

The best people in

The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats’ phrase, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of “shoulds” is a disease, a … Read more

With him in defense,

With him in defense, we could play Arthur Askey in goal. (after signing Ron Yeats) Bill Shankly

Blake has always been

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost. Anne Stevenson

And I love Jane

And I love Jane Austen’s use of language too–the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It’s a fact: Jane Austen … Read more