William Butler Yeats Quotes

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable.

The necessity of the idea creates its own style. The material itself dictates how it should be written.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality.

The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

If you know much about your work - why you work, how you work, your aims - you are probably not a poet.

Most artists create foundations where they put their own work. Here I'm not putting my own work. I'm just creating the chambers.

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

My poems often start with an idea, some kind of inspiration. I don't expect anything. Every now and then something like "The One Truth" comes out.

The true poem is not that which the public read. There is always a poem not printed on paper,... in the poet's life. It is what hehas become through his work. Not how is the idea expressed in stone, or on canvas or paper, is the question, but how far it has obtained form and expression in the life of the artist. His true work will not stand in any prince's gallery.

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform.

A poet must have died as a man before he is worth anything as a poet.

I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.

The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.