A famous Yeats 'quote' is not in his works
LOS ANGELES (AP) — It's a cherished quotation attributed to Irish poet William Butler Yeats, summoned in speeches by no less than President Barack Obama and California Gov. Jerry Brown: Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.
But there appears to be no evidence Yeats ever wrote it.
Yeats scholars on both sides of the Atlantic could find no trace of the often-quoted 14 words in databases that catalog writing produced by the poet, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923.
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