"I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right"
About this Quote
A poet muzzling himself sounds like humility; from Yeats, it’s also a flare shot into the night. The line carries the austerity of someone watching politics harden into emergency - “times like these” isn’t a neutral timestamp but a warning siren. Yeats is staging a crisis of authority: what good is lyric insight when power is being decided by men with guns, votes, or uniforms?
The subtext is double-edged. On one level, he’s acknowledging the limits of art as a corrective to governance. “We have no gift to set a statesman right” refuses the comforting fantasy that a beautifully turned phrase can reroute policy, halt violence, or uncorrupt institutions. On another level, the self-silencing is a form of accusation. If the poet must be silent, it’s because the political class has made a world where moral imagination doesn’t count as evidence. The line implies that statesmen aren’t merely mistaken; they’re unreachable by the tools poets possess: nuance, ambiguity, the slow persuasion of feeling.
Context matters: Yeats wrote amid Ireland’s revolutionary upheavals and the brutal aftermath of idealism colliding with statecraft. He’d seen how slogans devour complexity and how cultural nationalism can demand that artists become mascots. This sentence resists conscription. It’s Yeats stepping back from the podium and, in doing so, making the silence loud - an indictment of a public sphere that rewards certainty over wisdom and action over thought.
The subtext is double-edged. On one level, he’s acknowledging the limits of art as a corrective to governance. “We have no gift to set a statesman right” refuses the comforting fantasy that a beautifully turned phrase can reroute policy, halt violence, or uncorrupt institutions. On another level, the self-silencing is a form of accusation. If the poet must be silent, it’s because the political class has made a world where moral imagination doesn’t count as evidence. The line implies that statesmen aren’t merely mistaken; they’re unreachable by the tools poets possess: nuance, ambiguity, the slow persuasion of feeling.
Context matters: Yeats wrote amid Ireland’s revolutionary upheavals and the brutal aftermath of idealism colliding with statecraft. He’d seen how slogans devour complexity and how cultural nationalism can demand that artists become mascots. This sentence resists conscription. It’s Yeats stepping back from the podium and, in doing so, making the silence loud - an indictment of a public sphere that rewards certainty over wisdom and action over thought.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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