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