"It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my… - William Butler Yeats

"It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

[from "The Circus Animals' Desertion"]"

English
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About William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish symbolist poet, dramatist and mystic. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He compiled the Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: W. B. Yeats • William Yeats • W.B. Yeats • WBY
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Originators like William Butler Yeats:
Lord Byron Alfred Tennyson John Keats Samuel Taylor Coleridge Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
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