William Butler Yeats Quotes

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

Any euphemism ceases to be euphemistic after a time and the true meaning begins to show through. It's a losing game, but we keep on trying.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

Much of the magic of language, of course, lies in its fluidity.

I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.

The truth is that only 1% of all new words are totally new, and of those an even smaller percentage are conjured up out of thin air. The vast majority of coinages are the product of some kind of repurposing, and the result has always been a mix of tradition and innovation.

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

Verbing weirds language.

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Every word was once a poem.

Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language.

I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.

Poesy and oratory omit things not essential, and insert little beautiful digressions, in order to place everything in the most effective light.

English is such a deliciously complex and undisciplined language, we can bend, fuse, distort words to all our purposes. We give old words new meanings, and we borrow new words from any language that intrudes into our intellectual environment.