A Quote by John Berryman

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

John Berryman

Quote Topics

Like Want Wanted Yeats

Quote Author

John Berryman
American - Poet
October 25, 1914 - January 7, 1972

I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me.

Linda Hamilton

Tony Wilson once compared me to WB Yeats. It didn't really mean that much because I didn't have a clue who Yeats was.

Shaun Ryder

As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.

Leonard Cohen

I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it.

Patti Smith

Anyone who has read Yeats's wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy's misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: "When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.

Randall Jarrell

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

Seamus Heaney

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

Seamus Heaney

It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.

Haruki Murakami

I would quite like to do something on Ireland about the culture, James Joyce, Yeats, persuade Seamus Heaney to have a chat and do some cooking.

Rick Stein

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca.

Leonard Cohen

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Robert Hass

I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.