Life & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats is bragging, but he’s doing it with the sly self-mythologizing that made him such a modern celebrity-poet: he turns biography into doctrine. “Healthy long lived race” reads like a personal pedigree statement, yet the phrase is slippery enough to gesture toward an entire lineage - Irish, Anglo-Irish, artistic, even mystical. It’s not just that he expects to live a long time; it’s that longevity becomes a credential, proof that his kind of mind is built for endurance.

The subtext is defensive and strategic. Yeats spent much of his career being told he was out of step: too occult for realists, too aristocratic for radicals, too symbolic for pragmatists. This line insists that what looks like stubbornness is actually seasoning. Age isn’t a decline but a refinement process, a rebuttal to the cult of youth that was already taking hold in early modern culture. There’s also a quiet rebuke to the political impatience of his era. Ireland’s revolutions, Europe’s convulsions, the churn of new movements in art - all of it rewarded speed and certainty. Yeats counters with the authority of time, implying that the deepest judgments arrive late.

Context matters: Yeats’s late work is where the voice hardens and sharpens, where the poems get more austere, more candid about power, sex, and history. The line primes the reader to trust the late-period Yeats not despite his age but because of it. It’s a claim to relevance, delivered as inheritance: I will last, and my thinking will outlast the moment.