Quotations by Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian playwright, a major force behind the rise of modern realistic drama.

“Our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa's doll-child; and here the children have been my dolls.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

 “Yes indeed, there are endless things to be considered. You three must be together if you are to attain the true frame of mind for self-sacrifice and forgiveness.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck

“When I was at home with papa, he told me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“However wretched I may feel, I want to prolong the agony as long as possible. All my patients are like that. And so are those who are morally diseased;”

~ Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck

“…the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority...”

~ Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“A party is like a sausage machine; it mashes up all sorts of heads together into the same mincemeat—fatheads and blockheads, all in one mash!”

~ Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“Yes--you see there are some people one loves best, and others whom one would almost always rather have as companions.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“When I lost you, it was as if all the solid ground went from under my feet. Look at me now--I am a shipwrecked man clinging to a bit of wreckage.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that "walks" in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts

“The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?”

~ Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“You have never loved me. You have only thought it pleasant to be in love with me.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, A Doll's House

“There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children.”

~ Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

“That heartfelt love can weather unimpaired
Custom, and Poverty, and Age, and Grief.
Well, say it be so; possibly you’re right;
But see the matter in another light.
What love is, no man ever told us — whence
It issues, that ecstatic confidence
That one life may fulfill itself in two —
To this no mortal ever found the clue.
But marriage is a practical concern,
As also is betrothal, my good sir —
And by experience easily we learn
That we are fitted just for her, or her.
But love, you know, goes blindly to its fate,
Chooses a woman, not a wife, for mate;
And what if now this chosen woman was
No wife for you —?”

~ Henrik Ibsen, Love's Comedy

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Quotations by George Bernard Shaw

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Candida

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession

 “You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Getting Married

“A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Advice to a Young Critic

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion

“When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma: A Tragedy

“Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

“All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession

“… the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion & My Fair Lady

“Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it....”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Music in London

“I never resist temptation because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, The Apple Cart

“The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism

“I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Warren's Profession

“The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God

“Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion & My Fair Lady

“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”

~ George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

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Quotations by William Golding

WILLIAM GOLDING, AN INFLUENTIAL 20TH CENTURY ENGLISH POET, NOVELIST AND PLAYWRIGHT.

“I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away. Once there was this and that; and now-and the ship had gone.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn't you?' said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. 'You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“The thing is - fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Maybe," he said hesitantly, "maybe there is a beast." [...] "What I mean is, maybe it's only us.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.”

~ William Golding, Darkness Visible

“But nobody else understands about the fire. If someone threw you a rope when you were drowning. If a doctor said take this because if you don't take you'll die - you would, wouldn't you?”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly toward a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock.”

~ William Golding, Lord of the Flies

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Quotations by John Osborne

JOHN OSBORNE (1929 –1994) WAS AN ENGLISH PLAYWRIGHT, SCREENWRITER AND ACTOR, NOTED FOR REVITALIZING THE POSTWAR BRITISH THEATRE WITH HIS PLAY “LOOK BACK IN ANGER”.

“If you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“Anyone who's never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity. For twelve months, I watched my father dying - when I was ten years old.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“It's no good fooling about with love you know. You can't fall into it like a soft job without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts. If you can't bear the thought of messing up your nice, tidy soul, you better give up the whole idea of life and become a saint, because you'll never make it as a human being. It's either this world... or the next.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American Age - unless you're an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“Jimmy: The injustice of it is almost perfect! The wrong people going hungry, the wrong people being loved, the wrong people dying!”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“You see I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry - angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about - love... betrayal... and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know in your life.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“A refined sort of butcher, a woman is.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“They spend their time mostly looking forward to the past.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“The whole point of sacrifice is that you give up something you never really wanted in the first place.... People are doing it around you all the time. They give up their careers, say--or their beliefs--or sex.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger                              

“There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothingvery-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.”

~ John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

“I'm dead behind these eyes. I'm dead, just like the whole inert, shoddy lot out there. It doesn't matter because I don't feel a thing, and neither do they.”

~ John Osborne, The Entertainer

 “Go on - but don't think you can kill my confidence. I've had experts doing it for years.”

~ John Osborne, Three Plays

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Quotations by Thomas Hardy

THOMAS HARDY (1840 –1928) WAS AN ENGLISH NOVELIST AND POET.

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

 “A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”

~ Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?”

~ Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…”

~ Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”

~ Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail...”

~ Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!”

~ Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity”

~ Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!”

~ Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds”

~ Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.”

~ Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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My Cocoon Tightens Colors Tease

My Cocoon tightens — Colors tease (1099) 

Emily Dickinson

Full Text

Main Text	Bangla Translation
My Cocoon tightens — Colors tease —  I’m feeling for the Air —  A dim capacity for Wings Demeans the Dress I wear —	আমার কোকুন এঁটেছে—জীবন হয়েছে বিবর্ণ— আমি বাতাসের সন্ধান করছি— ডানার জন্য ক্ষীন ধারনক্ষমতা হীন করেছে আমার পোশাককে—
A power of Butterfly must be —  The Aptitude to fly Meadows of Majesty concedes And easy Sweeps of Sky —	প্রজাপতির শক্তি অবস্যই নিহিত রয়েছে তার— উড়ার স্বভাবিক ক্ষমতায় মহিমান্বিত তৃণভূমিজুড়ে এবং আকাশে অবাধ সঞ্চালনের মাঝে—
So I must baffle at the Hint And cipher at the Sign And make much blunder, if at least I take the clue divine	তাই আমার উচিত ইঙ্গিতটিকে পরাভূত করা এবং সংকেতটিকে খাটো করা এবং যথাসম্ভব অনিশ্তিত করা, যদি অন্ততঃ আমি ঐ সংকেতটিকে ঐশ্বরিক বলে ধরে নেই

Commentary

The subject poem recalls the powerlessness of women in an essentially male-dominated society. The prevailing social norms don’t permit women to lead a free life. Women are forced to spend life within the confinement of four walls, which is akin to entrapment. Dickinson artistically portrays this state of entrapment by conceiving herself trapped inside a cocoon.

The poet feels that the agonies of subjugation decline a woman's confidence and ultimately convert her into a powerless personality. The poet reinforces this idea by comparing her own insensibility with the free life of a butterfly. Like her, the butterfly is neither cocooned nor powerless since it has the freedom to fly anywhere. But trapped within a restricted society the poet cannot even move or breathe freely. Thus being restless and impatient with her mundane existence, she seeks in vain to free herself from the clutches of society.

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Quotations by Percy Bysshe Shelley

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, MAJOR ENGLISH ROMANTIC POET AND ONE OF THE GREATEST LYRIC POETS IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

“A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci (1819), Act I, sc. iii, l. 88.

“No more let life divide what death can join together.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

“See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea -
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me? ”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Love’s Philosophy

“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark

“Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Music, When Soft Voices Die

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy

“The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me- who knows how?
To thy chamber-window, Sweet!”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, I Arise From Dreams Of Thee

“Death is the veil which those who live call life;
They sleep, and it is lifted.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

“Man has no right to kill his brother, it is no excuse that he does so in uniform. He only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Declaration of Rights (1812), article 19

“What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, On Life  from the 1880 edition of The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in Verse and Prose, edited by H. Buxton Forman.

“Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

“Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet
There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,
Memories that make the heart a tomb,
Regrets which glide through the spirit’s gloom,
And with ghastly whispers tell
That joy, once lost, is pain.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Past

“We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.
We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.
We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;
It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free.
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability!”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mutability

“And the Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Sensitive Plant

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William Butler Yeats Quick Facts

William Butler Yeats

An Irish poet and playwright, who stands amongst the foremost literary figures of the 20th century.

Profile

• Full Name: William Butler Yeats
• Date of Birth: June 13, 1865
• Place of Birth: Dublin, Ireland
• Zodiac Sign: Gemini
• Death: January 28, 1939
• Place of Death: Roquebrune, France
• Cause of Death: Unspecified
• Ethnicity: White
• Nationality: Irish
• Place of Burial: Drumcliff Cemetery, Ireland
• Last Words: NA
• Epitaph:

"Cast a cold Eye

On Life, on Death.

Horseman, pass by!"

• Father: John Butler Yeats (1839–1922)
• Mother: Susan Pollexfen (1841–1900)
• Siblings:

1. Sister- Susan Mary "Lily" Yeats (1866–1849)
2. Sister- Elizabeth Corbett "Lolly" Yeats (1868–1940)
3. Brother- John "Jack" Butler Yeats (1871–1957)
4. Brother-Robert Corbet Yeats (1870 – 1873)
5. Sister- Jane Grace Yeats (1875 - 1876)

• Marriage: October 20, 1917
• Spouse: Bertha Georgie Yeats (née Hyde-Lees) (1892–1968)
• Children:

1. Daughter: Anne Butler Yeats (1919–2001)
2. Son: Michael Butler Yeats (1921–2007)

• Alma Mater: Metropolitan School of Art (now National College of Art and Design)
• Known for: masterful use of symbolism and traditional forms
• Criticized for: his obscure philosophical views
• Influences: Edmund Spenser (1552–1599),  John Donne (1573 –1631), Edmund Burke (1729-1797), James Macpherson (1736 –1796), William Blake (1757-1827), William Wordsworth (1770 1850), Robert Southey (1774 –1843), Alphonse de Lamartine (1790 –1869), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), John Keats (1795-1821), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 –1900)
• Influenced: John Millington Synge (1871-1909), James Joyce (1882 – 1941), Ezra Pound (1885 –1972), Shane Leslie (1885 –1971), Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918), T. S. Eliot (1888 –1965), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Frederick Guy Butler (1918 - 2001), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), Octavio Paz (1914 –1998), Robert Bly (b 1926), John Montague (1929 − 2016), Harold Pinter (1930 –2008), Patrick Roland Cullinan (1933 –2011), Wendell Berry (b 1934), Cormac McCarthy (b 1933), Seamus Heaney (1939 –2013), Derek Mahon (b 1941), Nick Laird (b 1975), Keith Donohue (b 1959)

Quotes

 “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.”
W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Major Themes

• Love
• Nature
• Immortality
• Death/Old Age
• Irish Myth
• History
• Irish Folklore
• Irish Nationalism
• Irish Politics
• Disintegration/chaos

Notable Works

Poetry

• The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)
• The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892)
• In the Seven Woods (1903)
• Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916)
• The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)
• Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
• The Tower (1928)
• The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

Plays

• Mosada (1886)
• The Land of Heart's Desire (1894)
• Diarmuid and Grania (1901)
• Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902)
• On Baile's Strand (1903)
• The Countess Cathleen (1911)
• At the Hawk's Well (1916)
• The Resurrection (1927)
• Purgatory (1938)

Other Works

• A Vision (1925)
• The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows
• Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (editor)

Did You Know?

• Yeats was the oldest of four children of John Butler Yeats and Susan Mary Pollexfen.
• His father John Butler Yeats renounced lawyership to become an artist.
• Yeats published his first books of poetry The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems in 1889 while he was a student at Dublin's Metropolitan School of Art.
• He was the first Irishman to receive the Nobel Prize in 1923.
• His Nobel Prize citation reads "for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation".
• Yeats’ last plays were Purgatory (1938) and The Death of Cuchulain (1938).
• In 1889 Yeats met the Irish Ntionalist Maud Gonne, his first love.
• His love for Maud Gonne was one sided and she refused several of his marriage proposals.
• Afterwards, Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne’s daughter Iseult MacBride, but got rejected by her as well.
• Maud Gonne had a profound influence in his works and Yeats dedicated his 1892 drama The Countess Kathleen to her.
• Having rejected by Maud Gonne’s daughter, Yeats married George Hyde-Less.
• During their marriage Yeats was 52 while George Hyde-Less was 25 years old.
• When his marriage was about to fail due to dull experience in the first honeymoon, his newlywed wife startled him with the notion of automatic writing, which helped creating a new creative period.
• The automatic writing included a series of strange fragmentary phrases uttered by his wife in her sleep, which Yeats implemented into works and published as A Vision (1925).
• Yeats’ infatuation with Maud Gonne lasted throughout his life.
• His first physical affair was with Olivia Shakespear.
• Yeats met his would be wife through Olivia Shakespear.
• Yeats was a very good friend of Indian Bengali poet Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

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