W.B. Yeats citations
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William Butler Yeats , est un poète et dramaturge irlandais, né le 13 juin 1865 à Sandymount et mort le 28 janvier 1939 à Roquebrune Cap Martin,, en France. Fils du peintre John Butler Yeats, il est l'un des instigateurs du renouveau de la littérature irlandaise et cofondateur, avec Lady Gregory, de l'Abbey Theatre. Il a reçu le prix Nobel de littérature en 1923.

Ses premières œuvres aspiraient à une richesse romantique, ce que retrace son recueil publié en 1893 Crépuscule celtique, mais la quarantaine venant, inspiré par sa relation avec les poètes modernistes comme Ezra Pound et en lien avec son implication dans le nationalisme irlandais, il évolua vers un style moderne sans concession. Yeats fut aussi un sénateur de l'État libre d'Irlande pendant deux mandats.

✵ 13. juin 1865 – 28. janvier 1939
W.B. Yeats photo
W.B. Yeats: 256   citations 0   J'aime

W.B. Yeats Citations

W.B. Yeats: Citations en anglais

“Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”

The Municipal Gallery Revisited http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1659/, st. 7
Last Poems (1936-1939)
Variante: Think where man's glory most begins and ends. And say my glory was I had such friends.
Contexte: You that would judge me, do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland's history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

W.B. Yeats livre The Tower

Among School Children http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1437/, st. 8
The Tower (1928)
Contexte: Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

“For everything that's lovely is
but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.”

Never Give All The Heart http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1545/
In The Seven Woods (1904)
Source: Poems
Contexte: Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
but a brief, dreamy, kind of delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

“The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

W.B. Yeats The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1919)
Contexte: p>Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?</p

“An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.”

W.B. Yeats livre Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 8
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), A Prayer For My Daughter http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1421/
Source: The Yeats Reader, Revised Edition: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose
Contexte: An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

“Things fall apart;
the center cannot hold…”

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“For he comes, the human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping
than he can understand.”

The Stolen Child http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1695/, st. 1
Crossways (1889)
Variante: Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Contexte: p>Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. </p

“Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
Oh, when may it suffice?”

W.B. Yeats livre Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 4
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/
Variante: Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
Source: Easter 1916 and Other Poems

“I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.”

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1663/
In The Seven Woods (1904)
Contexte: I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.

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