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“Only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity.”

  • John Madera

    • William Butler Yeats, Irish Poet and statesman, is photographed aboard the S.S. Europe as he arrives in New York, October 26, 1932. Yeats is in New York for the opening of his one-act play," The Words Upon the Window Pane", which is to open in New York October 28. (AP Photo)

    Happy birthday, William Butler Yeats! Here are some quotes from his writing.

    “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

    “I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world […] I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.”

    “Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.”

    “I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one’s self, something created in a moment and perpetually renewed…”

    “I must lie down where all the ladders start,
    in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

    “I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world […] I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.”

    “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.”

    “In dreams begins responsibility.”

    “All changed, changed utterly:
    A terrible beauty is born.”

    “We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.”

    “Only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the will to full intensity.”

    “Politics, for a vision-seeking man, can be but half achievement, a choice of an almost easy kind of skill instead of that kind which is, of all those not impossible, the most difficult.”

    “As I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard and cold, some articulation of the Image, which is the opposite of all that I am in my daily life, and all that my country is; yet man or nation can no more make this Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil into which it is cast.”

    “The newspaper is the roar of the machine.”

    “Does not all art come when a nature, that never ceases to judge itself, exhausts personal emotion so completely that something impersonal, something that has nothing to do with action or desire, suddenly starts into its place, something which is as unforeseen, as completely organised, even as unique, as the images that pass before the mind between sleeping and waking?”

    • John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024) and Nomad Science (Spuyten Duyvil Press, forthcoming in 2026).  His  fiction is also published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, Hobart, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His poetry is also published in elimae, Sixth Finch, Contrapuntos, and elsewhere. His criticism is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, two-time New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.

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