Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences. "

Related Quotes:

" Few in the Nineties would have ventured to prophesy that the remote dim singer of the Celtic Twilight would, in a new age, become the leading poet of the English-speaking world. None have disputed the claim of William Butler Yeats to that title. "

" Assonance is not the enemy of rhyme. It helps us to respect rhyme, which has been spoiled by mechanical use. "

" When I first discovered for myself the Celtic Twilight and read the earlier poems of Yeats and others, all was entirely incomprehensible to me. I groped through a mist of blurred meanings, stumbled through lines in which every accent seemed to be in the wrong place. "

" Passion in Ireland is denounced as evil and obscene. Women are the snares set for us by the Devil. "

" Yeats regarded his work as the close of an epoch, and the least of his later lyrics brings the sense of a great occasion. English critics have tried to claim him for their tradition, but, heard closely, his later music has that tremulous lyrical undertone which can be found in the Anglo-Irish eloquence of the eighteenth century. "

" In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate. "

" In contrast to our sinking taste, there has been a revival of interest in verse drama in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. The movement has been slow but sure and, above all, modest in its demands. "

" It takes us many years to learn that the passion for justice and the welfare of all, once it has been aroused, is the deepest one in moral life. "

" Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds. "

" Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself. "

" In expressing so completely his own type, Mr. Yeats presents us with the case for integrity. If we can express eventually our own scholastic mentality in verse, I believe that our art will lead us not towards, but away from, English art. "