W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, a leading figure of the Irish Literary Revival, a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, and the winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is also a standing magnet for unsourced wisdom: brisk, encouraging one-liners with no owner drift onto his name because he is famous, quotable, Irish and long dead. The tell here is register. Yeats wrote about gyres and swans and Byzantium; a blacksmith’s maxim about seizing the initiative sounds nothing like him, and no edition of his work contains it. The line reached his name in 1997, fifty-eight years after he died, by way of a Usenet quote-of-the-day post.