The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

All hatred driven hence, The soul recovers radical innocence And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting, And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will

Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.

It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.