William Butler Yeats Quotes
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
Yeats, William Butler. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death." The Wild Swans at Coole, Macmillan, 1919, p. 17.
The phrase was picked up by the press, and then became the title to a patriotic song of World War II.
A Federal Naval flotilla was preparing to attack South Carolina Forts Beauregard and Walker in the area of Hilton Head and Port Royal. The navy took both forts the next day with their naval bombardment so powerful that the Confederate Rebels had to abandon both forts gaining a kind of revenge for the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter at the war’s beginning.
He always appeared in a military uniform after that.
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others.
