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Who really said it

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry

Written by W. B. Yeats W. B. Yeats 1865–1939 · Irish poet and dramatist · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923
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Yeats wrote it in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, published by Macmillan in London in 1918. It is the first sentence of section V of the book’s first half, “Anima Hominis”, and it falls on page 21 of that first edition. The wording quoted here is exactly his, commas included. I checked it in two independent primary texts: the University of Toronto scan of the 1918 Macmillan printing, and Project Gutenberg’s transcription, which prints the section number V immediately above the sentence.

Last verified 27 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” W. B. Yeats, Per Amica Silentia Lunae (London: Macmillan, 1918), page 21, opening section V of "Anima Hominis". Verified word for word in the University of Toronto scan of the first edition and in Project Gutenberg’s text. Published 1918 and therefore public domain in the United States. Via Quotle.info

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Provenance

The source

Work
Per Amica Silentia Lunae
Published
Macmillan and Co., St Martin’s Street, London, 1918 — first edition; “Anima Hominis” is dated 25 February 1917 at its end
Location
“Anima Hominis”, section V, page 21 — the section’s opening sentence
Rights
Public domain — published 1918

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.

The opening of section V of “Anima Hominis”, transcribed from Project Gutenberg’s text ↗ and checked line for line against the University of Toronto scan of the 1918 Macmillan first edition ↗, where it sits on page 21. The second sentence is what the famous first one is for: Yeats is not praising introspection, he is explaining why real poems sound uncertain.

Scanned first edition
Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Macmillan, 1918) — full text
Project Gutenberg — Per Amica Silentia Lunae, full text

How we verified this

  • The sentence, in the first edition. The University of Toronto scan ↗ of Per Amica Silentia Lunae carries the title page “MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED, ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON, 1918”, and the sentence appears on page 21, under the running head “ANIMA HOMINIS”.
  • Its exact place in the book. Project Gutenberg’s transcription ↗ prints the numeral V directly above it, confirming that it opens section V rather than sitting somewhere in the middle of an argument. Both texts continue identically into “Unlike the rhetoricians…”
  • The anchor source agrees. Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ places the line in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), “Anima Hominis, part v” — the same location the two primary texts show.
  • What it is arguing for. A page later in the same section Yeats names the idea the sentence serves: “The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.” The quarrel with oneself is that doctrine in a single line — read the section ↗.
Public domain

Free to reuse. Per Amica Silentia Lunae was published in 1918, well before the 1931 cut-off for the United States public domain, and Project Gutenberg distributes the complete text on that basis. Quote it, print it, set it on a poster — no permission needed. Yeats died in 1939, so in jurisdictions that run copyright from the author’s death rather than publication the work is long out of copyright there too.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Context

Why it mattered

Yeats signed off the half of the book this sentence comes from on 25 February 1917 — both primary texts print that date at the end of “Anima Hominis” — and Macmillan published it in 1918. It is a short, strange book of prose about masks, ghosts and the soul, and he needed one sentence in it to separate what he did from what a politician does. This is it. Rhetoric aims outward and needs a crowd; poetry aims inward and has no audience to be confident in front of. The distinction let him keep writing about Ireland without becoming a propagandist for it.

The line is usually quoted as a compliment to self-examination. In context it is closer to a warning. The very next sentence says that poets “sing amid our uncertainty” and that “our rhythm shudders” — the quarrel with yourself is not a source of wisdom you draw on, it is a permanent condition you write from.

Rhetoric needs a crowd to be confident in front of. Poetry has nobody.

Read the full story

Per Amica Silentia Lunae is in two halves: “Anima Hominis”, the soul of man, and “Anima Mundi”, the soul of the world. The first works out Yeats’s theory of the anti-self — that a writer’s real work comes from confronting the opposite of their own temperament, the mask rather than the face. The sentence quoted here opens the section where that argument turns explicit, and section V ends by naming it: “the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it”.

Yeats then offers evidence from his own circle. He recalls “Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth” — almost certainly the Rhymers’ Club poets Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, whom he knew in 1890s London — as dissipated men who nonetheless “had the gravity of men who had found life out” and “a continual preoccupation with religion”. Wikipedia records Johnson as a Rhymers’ Club member whose poems Yeats himself selected for the Dun Emer Press in 1904, two years after Johnson’s death — see the article ↗. The point of the anecdote is that the quarrel is not a pose: it wrecked people Yeats had known.

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Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Per Amica Silentia Lunae — full textgutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg’s public-domain transcription. The sentence opens section V of “Anima Hominis”.
Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Macmillan, 1918) — scannedarchive.org

The University of Toronto copy of the first edition, used here as the independent check. The sentence is on page 21.
William Butler Yeats — sourced quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Attributes the line to Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), “Anima Hominis, part v” — matching both primary texts.
W. B. Yeatsen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the poet, 1865–1939, Nobel laureate in Literature in 1923 and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre.
Author: William Butler Yeatsen.wikisource.org

Wikisource’s author index of the Yeats texts hosted there — a starting point for the rest of his prose.
Lionel Johnsonen.wikipedia.org

The Rhymers’ Club poet Yeats almost certainly means by “Johnson… friends of my youth” a few lines after this sentence.

The author

About W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats

1865–1939 · Irish poet, dramatist and senator · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923

William Butler Yeats spent fifty years refusing to settle into a style, and the late poems are harder and better than the early ones — which is the rarest career a poet can have. He co-founded the Abbey Theatre, sat in the first Senate of the Irish Free State, and took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918) is the odd, essential prose book in which he explains the machinery: masks, anti-selves, and the quarrel a writer has to keep having with himself.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

W. B. Yeats, Per Amica Silentia Lunae (London: Macmillan, 1918), 21 — “Anima Hominis,” sec. V. Verified in the University of Toronto copy, Internet Archive ↗, and independently in Project Gutenberg’s text ↗, which prints the section numeral V immediately above the sentence. Location confirmed by Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’?” Last verified 27 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-make-out-of-the-quarrel-with-others-rhetoric-but-of-the/

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