US President Joe Biden referenced one of WB Yeats's most iconic poems while addressing US troops in the United Kingdom on Wednesday. 

The President was speaking to American troops stationed at the RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk ahead of the G7 summit in Cornwall on Friday. 

Biden spoke of the importance of the upcoming G7 summit and the upcoming NATO summit in Brussels on Monday and said that no single nation could take on the problems facing the world alone. 

He referenced Yeats's "Easter 1916" to highlight how the world had changed in recent years. 

"To quote another Irish poet, he said the world is changed, changed utterly," Biden told the US troops. "A terrible beauty has been born". 

Written months after the 1916 Easter Rising, Yeats's famous poem documents his internal conflict over Ireland's latest bid for freedom. 

The poem pays tribute to the leaders of the 1916 rebellion and ponders whether this latest conflict will have been in vain or whether it could have changed the tide in Ireland's struggle for freedom. 

Biden was quoting the poem's iconic refrain, which appears in three of the four stanzas and has become embedded in Irish culture and history. 

It is not the first time that the President has quoted the works of a famous Irish poet. 

Biden has frequently quoted Noble Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney in his speeches and regularly references "The Cure at Troy" - one of Heaney's most celebrated works. 

He recently paraphrased the Cure at Troy during a remembrance ceremony in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he became the first US President to honor the 1921 Tulsa race massacre victims.