Playwrights From Ireland

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"I think that I just drew a lot of nourishment from the poets that I then was aware of and able to be aware of, poets like William Blake, like Emily Dickinson, like Whitman, people whose—and then later, somewhat later, Yeats, who taught me in fact that poetry could be political and still be incredibly beautiful. And on and on, because one is always reading, one is always extending one’s range into the world of poetry translated from other languages, poetry from other centuries. All of that has been very important to me."

"I was easily entranced by pure sound and still am, no matter what it is saying: and any poet who mixes the poetry of the actual world with the poetry of sound interests and excites me more than I am able to say. In my student years, it was Yeats who seemed to do this better than anyone else. There were lines of Yeats that were to ring in my head for years: "Many times man lives and dies/Between his two eternities,/That of race and that of soul,/And ancient Ireland knew it all..../Did she in touching that lone wing/Recall the years before her mind/Became a bitter, an abstract thing/Her thought some popular enmity:/Blind and leader of the blind/Drinking the foul ditch where they lie?" I could hazard the guess that all the most impassioned, seductive arguments against the artist's involvement in politics can be found in Yeats. It was this dialogue between art and politics that excited me in his work, along with the sound of his language-never his elaborate mythological systems. I know I learned two things from his poetry, and those two things were at war with each other. One was that poetry can root itself in politics. Even if it defends privilege, even if it deplores political rebellion and revolution, it can, may have to, account for itself politically, consciously situate itself amid political conditions, without sacrificing intensity of language. The other, that politics leads to "bitterness" and "abstractness" of mind. makes women shrill and hysterical, and is finally a waste of beauty and talent: "Too long a sacrifice / can make a stone of the heart." There was absolutely nothing in the literary canon I knew to counter the second idea. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's anti-slavery and feminist poetry, H.D.'s anti-war and woman-identified poetry, like the radical-yes, revolutionary-work of Langston Hughes and Muriel Rukeyser, were still buried by the academic literary canon. But the first idea was extremely important to me: a poet-one who was apparently certified-could actually write about political themes, could weave the names of political activists into a poem: "MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connally and Pearce/Now and in time to come/Wherever green is worn/Are changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born.""

"Barriers dissolve, too, when confronted by the Eastern poems: the poems of the sacred books, in Yeats' translation of the Upanishads, or Isherwood's of the Bhagavad-Gita, and such work as E. Powys Mathers' Black Marigolds and Robert Payne's The White Pony, a rich anthology of Chinese poetry."

"'Tis a sure sign work goes on merrily, when folks sing at it."

"Young fellows will be young fellows."

"And this the burden of his song Forever used to be,— I care for nobody, no, not I, If no one cares for me."

"There was a jolly miller once, Lived on the river Dee; He worked and sung from morn till night: No lark more blithe than he."

"Hope! thou nurse of young desire."

"Health is the greatest of all possessions; a pale cobbler is better than a sick king."

"Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love, But - why did you kick me downstairs?"

"Ay, do despise me! I'm the prouder for it; I like to be despised."

"Fine feathers, they say, make fine birds."

"By candle-light nobody would have taken you for above five-and-twenty."

"There's nothing like being used to a thing."

"You're our enemy; lead the way, and we 'll precede."

"The quarrel is a very pretty quarrel as it stands; we should only spoil it by trying to explain it."

"You are not like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once, are you?"

"No caparisons, miss, if you please. Caparisons don't become a young woman."

"We will not anticipate the past; so mind, young people, — our retrospection will be all to the future."

"Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with."

"Too civil by half."

"As headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile."