Life & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

A curse is a strange form of editing: it assumes the trash can has a moral perimeter. Yeats isn’t merely embarrassed by discarded drafts; he’s dramatizing artistic privacy as sacred ground, the wastebasket as a sanctuary. “Accursed” pulls the line out of ordinary annoyance and into ritual, as if the poet is a priest furious at someone rummaging through the reliquary. The phrase “brings to light of day” sharpens the stakes. Daylight isn’t truth here; it’s exposure. It’s the harsh, flattening glare of public scrutiny that turns the artist’s messy process into a spectacle.

The subtext is control. Yeats, a poet obsessed with masks, personas, and the deliberate forging of a self in language, understands that a writer’s authority depends on the illusion of inevitability: that the final poem arrived whole, not through failure, second thoughts, and half-baked lines. To publish what he “cast away” is to reveal contingency. It’s not just that the scraps are bad; they threaten the myth of the finished Yeats.

Contextually, this fits a modern literary world increasingly hungry for the “workshop version” of genius: notebooks, juvenilia, letters, drafts mined for clues and profit. Yeats anticipates the posthumous industry that would turn the private laboratory of creation into public property. The curse is theatrical, but it’s also defensive, a last attempt to keep the artist’s rejected selves from being resurrected and made to speak.