Remarks by William Butler Yeats | V2Melody Quotations

“Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only.”

Celebrating art as an embodied encounter with the sensory world rather than pure abstraction · Essay, The Thinking of the Body

“But it is our instinct and not our intellect that chooses.”

Giving instinct the decisive role in an artist's choice of subject · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

“We must not ask is the world interested in this or that, for nothing is in question but our own interest, and we can understand no other.”

Rejecting audience calculation in favour of genuine personal engagement with a subject · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

“We cannot discover our subject-matter by deliberate intellect, for when a subject-matter ceases to move us we must go elsewhere.”

Arguing that genuine artistic subjects are discovered through emotional necessity rather than calculation · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

“The mind can never do the same thing twice over, and having exhausted simple beauty and meaning, it passes to the strange and hidden.”

Describing the mind's restless movement from familiar beauty towards strangeness and mystery · Essay, His Mistress’s Eyebrows

“If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to the ring where everything comes round again.”

Contrasting the saint's search for stillness with the artist's fascination with recurring life · Essay, In the Serpent’s Mouth

“The end for art is the ecstasy awakened by the presence before an ever changing mind of what is permanent in the world.”

Defining artistic fulfilment as an encounter between changing consciousness and enduring reality · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

“The artist stands between the saint and the world of impermanent things.”

Placing the artist between spiritual permanence and the transient world of experience · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

“The imaginative writer differs from the saint in that he identifies himself—to the neglect of his own soul, alas!—with the soul of the world.”

Contrasting the artist's immersion in worldly experience with the saint's pursuit of transcendence · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

“No mind is more valuable than the images it contains.”

Affirming the central importance of a mind's store of emotionally resonant images · Essay, The Two Kinds of Asceticism

“All art is dream, and what the day is done with is dreaming ripe.”

Presenting art as the transformation of lived experience through dream and imagination · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

“The subject-matter of his meditation and invention is old, and he will disdain a too conscious originality in the arts.”

Preferring deep engagement with tradition to self-conscious novelty · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

“Emotion, on the other hand, grows intoxicating and delightful after it has been enriched with the memory of old emotions, with all the uncounted flavours of old experience.”

Describing cultivated emotion as something deepened by memory and accumulated human experience · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

“It is what is old and far off that stirs us the most deeply.”

Expressing Yeats's belief in the imaginative power of antiquity, legend and distance · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

“Drama is a means of expression, not a special subject matter.”

Defending the dramatist's freedom to draw upon any period, setting or subject · Essay, The Subject Matter of Drama

“The test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.”

Locating poetry's ultimate test in felt delight rather than intellectual argument · Essay, Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times Was Made a Poet

“It may happen that poets will be made more often by their sins than by their virtues.”

Suggesting that artistic development may arise from imperfection and transgression rather than virtue · Essay, Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times Was Made a Poet

“I am certain that every high thing was invented in this way, between sleeping and waking, as it were.”

Associating imaginative creation with the threshold between waking consciousness and dream · Essay, Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of Its Own

“He has felt something in the depth of his mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as possible.”

Describing artistic creation as giving sensory form to deep inward experience · Essay, Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of Its Own

“There is something of an old wives’ tale in fine literature.”

Locating an element of ancient oral storytelling within enduring literature · Essay, Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of Its Own

“The lovers and fighters of old imaginative literature are more vivid experiences in the soul than anything but one’s own ruling passion.”

Arguing that great imaginative characters can become profound inner experiences · Essay, Has the Drama of Contemporary Life a Root of Its Own

“The novel of contemporary educated life is upon the other hand a permanent form because having the power of psychological description it can follow the thought of a man.”

Identifying psychological interiority as one of the novel's distinctive strengths · Essay, The Play of Modern Manners

“The common heart will always love better the tales that have something of an old wives’ tale.”

Affirming the enduring emotional appeal of traditional storytelling · Essay, The Praise of Old Wives’ Tales

“Our deceit will give us style, mastery, that dignity, that lofty and severe quality Verlaine spoke of.”

Suggesting that artistic restraint and transformation create style rather than simple confession · Essay, The Tree of Life

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