W. B. Yeats – Interesting Literature

10 of the Best W. B. Yeats Quotations

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. His first collection, Crossways, appeared in 1889 when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry bore the clear influence of Romanticism.

As his career developed and literary innovations came with modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, Yeats’s work retained its focus on traditional verse forms and rhyme schemes, but he became more political, more allusive, and more elliptical. Yeats’s precise relationship with literary modernism remains a subject of much debate, but he is certainly an important poet of the first few decades of the twentieth century.

A Summary and Analysis of W. B. Yeats’ ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Divided into six parts, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ is, along with ‘Easter 1916’, probably W. B. Yeats’s best-known political poem. It is also among his longer and more ambitious works. In this post, we’ll offer a summary and analysis of the poem, taking it section by section.

A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What connects Marianne Faithfull, the actress Emma Thompson, the German electronic group Tangerine Dream, and the British comedian and quiz host, Alexander Armstrong? The answer is that they have all recorded musical settings of ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, one of W. B. Yeats’s great early poems. ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ was published in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems in 1889, when Yeats was still in his mid-twenties.

‘Never Give All the Heart’: A Poem by W. B. Yeats

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

As the title of this short Yeats poem makes clear, the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats offers the would-be lover some advice: don’t dive headlong into love or infatuation, for your beloved won’t thank you for it: never give all the heart. It’s best to keep a little passion back: ‘He that made this knows all the cost, / For he gave all his heart and lost.’

Never Give All the Heart

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;

A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Lapis Lazuli’ belongs to W. B. Yeats’s late phase, in the 1930s. Like a number of Yeats’s other late poems, it is concerned with the place and treatment of art in the modern world, a situation which Yeats considers by taking in all of history. The poem’s ‘argument’ takes a bit of unpicking; before we get to our analysis, here’s a reminder of this mysterious poem.