Question

According to W B Yeats, poetry is a quarrel with one's self...what does it actually mean ?

Answer 1

Apparently Yeats actually said "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." He appears to have had quite a complex notion of the self and the anti-self, perhaps a self-destructive side that is part of the individual. In any case, it seems that he means to express that poetry is the result of an internal struggle, a struggle within the individual to reconcile ideas, experiences, and feelings.