Fantasy Authors

"I think more of Yeats sometimes when I write than I do of anything else."

"When I went to college (from 1959 to 1963), there were no women's studies courses, no anthologies that stressed a female heritage, no public women's movement. Poetry meant Yeats, Lowell, James Dickey. Without even realizing it, I assumed that the voice of the poet had to be male."

"There are some poets whose poetry can be considered more or less in isolation, for experience and delight. There are others whose poetry, though giving equally experience and delight, has a larger historical importance. Yeats was one of the latter: he was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them. This is a very high position to assign him: but I believe that it is one which is secure."

"Born into a world in which the doctrine of 'Art for Art's sake' was generally accepted, and living on into one in which art has been asked to be instrumental to social purposes, he held firmly to the right view which is between these, though not in any way a compromise between them, and showed that an artist, by serving his art with entire integrity, is at the same time rendering the greatest service he can to his own nation and to the world."

"his poetry is always with me and I know plenty of it off by heart. I often find myself quoting him – my work is full of Yeats ideas and lines which I have absorbed."

"An idea of art opposed to the idea of utility, an idea of an audience opposed to the idea of popularity, an idea of the peripheral becoming the central culture – in these three ideas Yeats provided Irish writing with a programme for action. But whatever its connection with Irish nationalism, it was not, finally, a programme of separation from the English tradition. His continued adherence to it led him to define the central Irish attitude as one of self-hatred... The pathology of literary unionism has never been better defined."

"I knew Yeats. He made a very strong impression. He wasn't an intimate friend, but I met him at Lady Ottoline Morrell's and he talked to me about how he lived very quietly just seeing a few friends and some witches... He was a very, very unexpected personality. Well, perhaps not unexpected. One might have expected it. But a very unusual personality. Because he was, I think, a very great poet... [H]e talked in this chanting, curious, Celtic voice... He read with his great chanting voice and then he beat time, you know."

"Yeats was an inexhaustible source of delight. I’ve never known anyone so forgetful of little details. Whenever it came time for his lecture in on the campus, he seized his portfolio and marched over only to find after he arrived on the stage that he had brought the wrong lecture or no lecture at all in an empty portfolio. This was constantly happening."

"Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise."

"By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs. The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.Now he is scattered over a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections; To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living."

"No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!"

"Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid."

"Irish poets, earn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds."

"Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."

"Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of."

"I have found nothing half so good As my long-planned half solitude, Where I can sit up half the night With some friend that has the wit Not to allow his looks to tell When I am unintelligible."

"Because there is safety in derision I talked about an apparition, I took no trouble to convince, Or seem plausible to a man of sense."

"A bloody and a sudden end, Gunshot or a noose, For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose."

"Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence."

"Down the mountain walls From where pan’s cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam."

"You that would judge me, do not judge alone This book or that, come to this hallowed place Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; Think where man's glory most begins and ends And say my glory was I had such friends."

"You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?"

"Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."

"Grant me an old man’s frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call."

"My temptation is quiet. Here at life’s end Neither loose imagination, Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known."

"If soul may look and body touch, Which is the more blest?"

"Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay."

"Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce."

"All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia."

": Supernatural Songs, IX, The Four Ages of Man"

"Then he struggled with the mind; His proud heart he left behind. Now his wars on God begin; At stroke of midnight God shall win."

": Supernatural Songs, VIII, Whence Had They Come?"

"Whence had they come, The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?"

"I pray — for word is out And prayer comes round again — That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man."

"God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone; He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrow-bone."

"Seek out reality, leave things that seem."

"Things said or done long years ago, Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled."

"My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless."

"Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb."

"All women dote upon an idle man Although their children need a rich estate. No man has ever lived that had enough Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love."

"I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest."

"I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul."

"What matter if I live it all once more? Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; The finished man among his enemies?— How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling and disfigured shape The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape?"

"My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows And falls into the basin of the mind That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known — That is to say, ascends to Heaven; Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone."

"My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war? Think of ancestral night that can, If but imagination scorn the earth And intellect is wandering To this and that and t'other thing, Deliver from the crime of death and birth."

"I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes. But when this soul, its body off, Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows,And give his own and take his own And rule in his own right; And though it loved in misery Close and cling so tight, There’s not a bird of day that dare Extinguish that delight."

"Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead, Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade, The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night, That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant."

"What were all the world’s alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen’s arms?"

"But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent."

"‘Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,’ I cried. ‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth Nor grave nor bed denied.'"