‘My first principle in my work is that poetry must make the land in which we live a holy land as Homer made Greece.’ (1897; quoted by Edna Longley, in ‘Letter from Belfast’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 Dec. 2002, p.15.)

‘I must leave my sights and images to explain themselves as the years go by, and one poem lights up another.’ (Preface to Poems, 1899; quoted in T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats, London: Methuen 1965 [rev. edn.], p.126.)

‘It seems to me that I have found what I wanted. When I try to put all into a phrase I say, “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it”. (Letters, ed. Allan Wade, London Rupert-Hart Davis 1954, p.922.)