“In both are the Muses greatly honoured, and we their servants highly blessed, whose studious labours have received their life, growth, and perfection, cherished and enabled by the warmth your beams have cast upon them.”

Crediting a patron's favour with the life and growth of a musician's work · Dedication to the Earl of Hertford, A Booke of Ayres, 1606

• Growth
• Music
• Patronage

“It is a question hardly to be determined whether Music may esteem herself more graced by the singular skill and exquisite knowledge wherewith your Lordship is endued, or by the many benefits your bounty hath conferred on the professors of that faculty.”

Setting musical skill and generous patronage as twin honours to the art · Dedication to the Earl of Hertford, A Booke of Ayres, 1606

• Music
• Patronage
• Skill

“The difference between our two tracks of education, and ways of life, is entirely in your favour, and gives you the preference every manner of way.”

He sets Burns's lived experience above his own learning as the stronger claim on the muse · Letter to Robert Burns, Linshart, 14 November 1787

• Education
• Humility
• Poetry

“Your acknowledgment of my poor but just encomiums on your surprising genius, and your opinion of my rhyming excursions, are both, I think, by far too high.”

A modest deflection of praise from the man Burns had called the author of Scotland's best song · Letter to Robert Burns, Linshart, 14 November 1787

• Modesty
• Poetry
• Praise

“I was like Robin Goodfellow: when the maids spilt the milk-pans, or kept any racket, they would lay it upon Robin.”

A wry account of being blamed at court for mischief started by others; the gloss is as Bacon reports it · Remark of himself, recorded by Francis Bacon

• Court
• Humour
• Reputation

“With humble sails, after I had once ventured upon this spreading ocean of images, my apprehensive youth, for lack of a well touched compass, did easily wander beyond proportion.”

On how his early tragedies outgrew their design once imagination took hold · Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney

• Imagination
• Writing
• Youth

“These exercises of my youth I dedicate to that worthy Sir Philip Sidney, so long since departed.”

His prose life of Sidney began as an offering of early poems to a dead friend · Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney

• Friendship
• Memory
• Poetry

“Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, councillor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney.”

He chose service and friendship, not authorship, as the titles he wished remembered · Epitaph he composed for his own tomb at Warwick

• Friendship
• Identity
• Service

“For my own part I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit.”

He sets experience and character above verbal brilliance as the aim of his writing · Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (Life of Sidney)

• Life
• Wit
• Writing

“I know the world and believe in God.”

A compressed creed of living in a fallen world without withdrawing from it · Letter to Sir John Coke, 1 February 1613

• Conviction
• Faith
• World

“I don't believe in pure form. I don't believe in pure anything.”

An early rejection of abstraction that later shaped his plea for impure poetry · Letter, 25 September 1926

• Art
• Belief
• Form

“If war is the test of reality, then all poetry is unreal; but in that case unreality is a virtue.”

Written after the outbreak of war, defending both escapist and realist verse · Book, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1941)

• Poetry
• Reality
• War

“The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others — usually for both.”

Self and community are hard to separate in the act of speaking · Essay, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Community
• Poetry
• Voice

“The poet has no greater number of muscles than the ordinary conversationalist; he merely has more highly developed muscles and better coordination.”

Craft as training of a faculty everyone already possesses · Essay, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Craft
• Language
• Skill

“The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises.”

Everyday speech already uses words poetically; the poet only does it more strictly · Essay, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Language
• Poetry
• Speech

“I think that the poet is only an extension — or, if you prefer it, a concentration — of the ordinary man.”

Rejecting the romantic gap between poet and common reader · Essay, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Humanity
• Individuality
• Poets

“Poetry must be honest even before it is beautiful.”

Honesty of subject comes before the ideal of pure beauty · Essay, Subject in Modern Poetry

• Beauty
• Honesty
• Poetry

“I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, susceptible to physical impressions.”

His portrait of the poet as a man of the world, not a recluse · Essay, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Humour
• Life
• Poets

“Others can tell lies more efficiently; no one except the poet can give us poetic truth.”

A defence of the poet's particular kind of honesty in a specialised world · Preface, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Honesty
• Poetry
• Truth

“The writer today should be not so much the mouthpiece of a community as its conscience, its critical faculty, its generous instinct.”

The poet should disturb what a public already knows, not echo it · Preface, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Community
• Conscience
• Writers

“The poet is a maker, not a retail trader.”

Against the slogan-poet who merely sells a ready-made message · Preface, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Craft
• Integrity
• Poetry

“The poet, I consider, is both critic and entertainer (and his criticism will cut no ice unless he entertains).”

Poetry must hold an audience if its judgement is to matter · Preface, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Criticism
• Pleasure
• Poetry

“This book is a plea for impure poetry, that is, for poetry conditioned by the poet's life and the world around him.”

His programme for a poetry answerable to ordinary life rather than to pure form · Preface, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (1938)

• Life
• Poetry
• Reality

“I believe in freedom regardless of form.”

Separates liberty in the poem from any particular verse shape · Note on poetry, 1937

• Form
• Freedom
• Poetry