The wording is genuine, but it belongs to the poet’s father. John Butler Yeats wrote it in a letter to his son dated 6 September 1915, and Ezra Pound printed it on page 15 of Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats (Cuala Press, 1917) — the sentence appears there verbatim in the scanned first edition.
“What can be explained is not poetry” John Butler Yeats, letter to his son W. B. Yeats, 6 September 1915; printed in Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats, selected by Ezra Pound (Cuala Press, 1917), p. 15. Commonly misattributed to W. B. Yeats.
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to W. B. Yeats. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The letter it came from
Work
Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats, Selected by Ezra Pound
I take up some lines of poetry and say I will explain them and make the effort, always to end in giving it up. No explanation is possible. There is nothing to be done except to read out with friendliest voice the lines I started to make plain. What can be explained is not poetry. It is when the powers of explanation desert him that the poet writes verse.
From a letter of 6 September 1915
The passage sits on page 15 of the Cuala Press edition. Later in the same volume Yeats presses the distinction further, writing that what can be communicated or explained is prose — so this was a settled position, not a one-off epigram.
6 September 1915 — John Butler Yeats writes to his son the poet. Ezra Pound selects the passage for Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats ↗, printed by the Cuala Press in 1917 in an edition of 400 copies; the sentence appears on page 15.
1917–1918 — The Athenaeum reviews the book in August 1917 and reprints the line among what it calls “scraps of truth and penetrating insight”; in June 1918 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse quotes it and names John Butler Yeats outright. Both citations are set out by Quote Investigator ↗.
1930–1950 — Carl Sandburg quotes it in Early Moon as coming from “the father of a great Irish poet,” and in his 1950 Complete Poems preface recalls hearing W. B. Yeats quote his father in Chicago. A 1969 Parents’ article then credits the line to Sandburg himself — chronology at Quote Investigator ↗.
2001 to now — Random House Webster’s Quotationary files it under William Butler Yeats “recalling his father’s words,” and today the qualifier is gone entirely: Goodreads ↗ prints it as plain “W.B. Yeats” with no source. Wikiquote’s W. B. Yeats page does not carry the line at all.
✓Public domain
The line was first published in Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats (Cuala Press, 1917), well before the 1931 cut-off for US copyright, and the complete volume is freely readable at the Internet Archive ↗. It is English original prose, not a translation, so no separate translator’s rights attach — the sentence is in the public domain in the United States.
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.
Fact-check
Who gets the credit, and why
The sentence is authentic, and it is a Yeats — just the wrong one. Almost every modern citation moves it one generation forward, from the painter who wrote it to the son who received it.
✕
The near-universal creditW. B. Yeats Wrong Yeats
Quote aggregators print the line under the poet’s name with no source attached — see Goodreads ↗ and AZQuotes ↗. Quote Investigator names the two mechanisms at work: credit drifts between people with similar names, and drifts from the less famous to the more famous. Both apply here at once. W. B. Yeats did read the sentence — it was addressed to him — but he did not write it.
✕
A 1969 magazine creditCarl Sandburg Quoter mistaken for author
Sandburg quoted the line twice in Early Moon (1930) and correctly called its author “the father of a great Irish poet.” A 1969 article in Parents’ magazine nonetheless presented it as Sandburg’s own, citing his introduction to that book — the citation chain documented by Quote Investigator ↗.
✕
A reference-book compromiseW. B. Yeats “recalling his father’s words” Half-right
Random House Webster’s Quotationary (2001) headed the entry with William Butler Yeats and his dates, then noted he was recalling his father, sourcing it to Sandburg’s 1950 preface. The nested attribution is accurate as far as it goes, but it puts the poet’s name at the top — and that is the part that got copied. Quote Investigator ↗ reproduces the entry.
✓John Butler Yeats wrote it to his son in a letter dated 6 September 1915; Ezra Pound printed it on page 15 of the 1917 Cuala Press Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats, and the full scan is online ↗.
Context
Why he said it
The remark is not an aphorism struck for effect — it is a man losing an argument with himself in a letter. John Butler Yeats describes picking up some lines of poetry, resolving to explain them, and giving up every time. The failure is the finding: “No explanation is possible.” What follows is the sentence the internet now hangs on his son.
He circled the same idea elsewhere in the volume, writing that what can be communicated or explained is prose. The distinction mattered to him because he was writing to a working poet, and the letters are full of a father pressing a case about what poetry is for. Ezra Pound, who selected the passages, worried in his editor’s note that snatching at “salient thoughts” would make Yeats senior look sententious — which is more or less what a century of quotation has done.
It is when the powers of explanation desert him that the poet writes verse.
How the credit walked away from him
Carl Sandburg is the hinge. He quoted the line twice in Early Moon (1930), attributing it to “the father of a great Irish poet,” and in the 1950 preface to his Complete Poems he recalled hearing W. B. Yeats quote his father in Chicago. Sandburg was scrupulous both times — but a 1969 magazine article credited the line to Sandburg himself, and a 2001 reference book filed it under William Butler Yeats “recalling his father’s words.”
From there the qualifier fell off. Quote aggregators today print the sentence under “W.B. Yeats” with no source line at all, which is how a documented 1915 letter from a painter becomes a bare epigram from a Nobel laureate.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1839–1922 · Irish portrait painter and letter-writer · father of W. B. Yeats
John Butler Yeats was an Irish portrait painter who abandoned a legal career for art and never quite made it pay. In 1907 he sailed to New York with his daughter Lily and simply stayed, living out his last years in a West 29th Street boarding house and writing home relentlessly. His letters to his son the poet became his real literary work — Ezra Pound selected passages from them in 1917, and the volume made a minor sage of a man who thought of himself as a painter.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Yeats, John Butler. Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats. Selected by Ezra Pound. Churchtown, Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1917, p. 15. Letter dated 6 September 1915.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘What can be explained is not poetry’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/what-can-be-explained-is-not-poetry/