“Remembrance is essential and fundamental to poetic feeling.”

Original: La rimembranza è essenziale e principale nel sentimento poetico. — Leopardi places remembered distance at the heart of the imaginative transformation that makes experience poetic. · Zibaldone, entry 4426, 14 December 1828 (Italian)

• Imagination
• Memory
• Poetry

“The human memory is not to be trusted too far.”

A practical warning to writers about relying upon memory rather than verification · Essay, Literary Composition

• Knowledge
• Memory
• Writing

“I do not know what unfortunate obsession drove me at that time to bare my soul before the public's consideration, or disregard, which was more likely.”

Original: No sé qué infausta monomanía me acuciaba en aquella época a desnudar mi alma ante la pública consideración o desconsideración, que era más probable. — Looking back ruefully on the exposure of private experience in his earlier writing · Academy address, Semi-poesía y posibilidad, 1938 (Spanish)

• Memory
• Privacy
• Writing

“It is astonishing how rapidly memories of that kind disappear.”

Reflecting on how quickly achievements can vanish from collective memory · The Autobiography of Lord Alfred Douglas, 1929

• Fame
• Memory
• Time

“If a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”

Housman's celebrated description of his physical response to powerful poetry · Lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933

• Body
• Memory
• Poetry

“We only want to forget the forked lightning.”

Condensing the desire to escape a painful and disruptive past into a vivid image · Memoir, End to Torment

• Imagery
• Memory
• Suffering

“The years were immaterial. He liked my light summer dresses. Ezra was not consciously a love-image. But he lurked there, hid there, under the years.”

Reflecting on how an early attachment can remain hidden beneath decades of later experience · Memoir, End to Torment

• Love
• Memory
• Time

“No, my poetry was not dead but it was built on or around the crater of an extinct volcano.”

Describing creativity surviving around the remains of profound emotional upheaval · Memoir, End to Torment

• Creativity
• Memory
• Poetry

“Memory is the mother, begetter of all drama, idea, music, science or song.”

Presenting memory as the source from which creative and intellectual life emerges · Essay, Notes on Thought and Vision

• Art
• Creativity
• Memory

“Maybe the loss of Ezra left a vacuum; anyway, Frances filled it like a blue flame.”

A vivid recollection of how one intense relationship followed another · Memoir, End to Torment

• Loss
• Love
• Memory

“I could recite passages from The Golden Legend at eight years.”

Evidence of an unusually early appetite and memory for poetry · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Childhood
• Memory
• Poetry

“Years afterwards he often spoke to me of that verse and wished he had the slate to present to some one who liked the story and my poetry.”

Shows how an apparently trivial childhood verse became part of his personal legend · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Childhood
• Memory
• Poetry

“These stories, told at my mother's doorstep in the owl's light, are the first things I remember.”

Connects his earliest memories with oral storytelling and home · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Memory
• Motherhood
• Storytelling

“I have heard my mother say many times that the Ledwidges were once a great people in the land.”

Recalls a family history preserved through his mother's storytelling · Autobiographical letter to Lewis Chase, 6 June 1917

• Family
• History
• Memory

“How is Navan? Remember me to the pump on the market square when next you go there, and the clock over Walshe’s.”

His affection for home extends to its most ordinary familiar landmarks · Letter to Paddy Healy, 1917

• Home
• Longing
• Memory

“You will be surprised to hear from me again after a silence nearly three years long. The reason I write is because I have been dreaming about you and it has made me rather anxious.”

An intimate admission of how memory prompted him to renew an old connection · Letter to Lizzie Healy, 1917

• Dreams
• Friendship
• Memory

“I have many more old ones in my haversack and some day soon will transcribe them and send you copies. They are all faded with Balkan rains.”

A vivid picture of manuscripts physically sharing the hardships of war · Letter to Lord Dunsany, 21 March 1916

• Memory
• War
• Writing

“I write an occasional little thing yet which you will read some day, but I lost a lot of manuscripts in the long retreat from the Balkan front.”

Records the vulnerability of his writing amid military retreat · Letter to Lord Dunsany, 19 January 1916

• Memory
• War
• Writing

“Once I found myself wondering if a cow that I knew to have a disease called ‘timber-tongue’ had really died.”

An oddly mundane memory arising in the middle of battle · Letter to Lord Dunsany, August 1915

• Humour
• Memory
• War

“I was lying one side of a low bush on August 15th, pouring lead across a little ridge into the Turks and for four hours my mind was on the silliest things of home.”

Shows homesickness intruding even during the violence of Gallipoli · Letter to Lord Dunsany, August 1915

• Home
• Memory
• War

“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

• Emotion
• Experience
• Memory

“This great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.”

Summarising the central importance of symbolism to Yeats's imaginative and occult thought · Essay, Magic, in Ideas of Good and Evil

• Memory
• Mind
• Symbolism

“The borders of our memories are as shifting, and our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.”

Imagining individual memory as participating in a larger collective memory · Essay, Magic, in Ideas of Good and Evil

• Memory
• Mystery
• Nature

“Time makes no difference with regard to some feelings. I once imagined a change of place and other circumstances might, but it is not so with me.”

Reflecting on emotions and attachments that survive both time and distance · Letter to Alicia Mason, 1834

• Emotion
• Memory
• Time