Abstract
This chapter situates Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats within their cultural, political and historical context. The chapter argues that their common cultural heritage and particular experience of living as colonized subjects in Victorian London provided both writers with a mutual understanding and shared perspective that encouraged the growth of Wilde’s influence on Yeats.
Both writers were acutely aware of the cultural gulf that separated the Irish from their English neighbours. This awareness allows Yeats a special insight into Wilde whom he interprets in terms of his nationality. Yeats notes Wilde’s method of negotiating the complexities of Irish identity in imperial London, and the elements of play and protest that he discerns within Wilde’s response excite his youthful admiration of Wilde.
Wilde’s personal knowledge of Irish myth and culture and unambiguous affirmation of his Irish identity attract Yeats and support his own views on cultural nationalism.
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- 1.
Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day in association with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, 2007), p. 22.
- 2.
David A. Valone and Jill Marie Bradbury, Anglo-Irish Identities, 1571–1845 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), p. 16. For further discussion on this issue of Ireland as a colony, see: Terry Eagleton, “Afterword”, in Terrence McDonough, ed., Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005); Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Matthew Kelly, “Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s” in Past & Present, No. 204 (August 2009), pp. 127–154 (Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40586924; Joe Cleary, “Amongst Empires: A Short History of Ireland and Empire Studies in International Context”, Eire-Ireland, xlii, 1–2 (2007).
- 3.
Michael de Nie, The Eternal Paddy: Irish Identity and the British Press, 1798–1882 (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), p. 5.
- 4.
Ibid, p. 3.
- 5.
Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 229.
- 6.
Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1983), pp. 169, 170.
- 7.
Declan Kiberd , Inventing Ireland (London: Cape, 1995), p. 6.
- 8.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 9.
- 9.
M.A.G. O Tuathaigh, “The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration”. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 31 (Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal Historical Society Stable, 1981), pp. 149–173. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3679050.
- 10.
See R.F. Foster and Fintan Cullen, Conquering England: The Irish in Victorian London (London: National Portrait Gallery Exhibitions, 2005).
- 11.
John Banim, The Anglo-Irish of the Nineteenth Century: A Novel (London: Colburn, New Burlington Street, 1928), p. 29.
- 12.
For more on English/Anglo-Irish relationship see: Anthony Trollope, The Palliser Novels/The Parliamentary Novels, in particular, Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1874); Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September; Patrick Lonergan, “Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels and Anti-Irish Prejudice”, New Hibernia Review/Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 11, No. 2 (University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies) Stable, Summer 2007), pp. 116–129. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20558166.
- 13.
M.A.G. O Tuathaigh, “The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration”, p. 163.
- 14.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 169.
- 15.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 121.
- 16.
This ambivalent position of the colonized that closely resemble the colonizer yet remain different in terms of “liberty, status and rights” is discussed by Peter Childs and Patrick Williams in their work on post-colonialism. An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (London: Prentice Hall, 1997), p. 131.
- 17.
Elizabeth Bowen captures this imperialist mindset in her novel, The Last September (1929; rpt. London: Vintage/Random House, 1998), pp. 92, 93.
- 18.
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 8.
- 19.
Bruce Nelson, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 5.
- 20.
Molinari’s phrase was, “une variété de negres blancs”. Anne McClintock, “White Negroes and Celtic Calibans: antinomies of race” in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York/London: Routledge, 1995), p. 52.
- 21.
“For late Victorian artists drew bigger and better Irish ape-men than Judy’s principal cartoonist from 1868–1887, William Henry Boucher (1837–1906), whose arresting images of arrested Paddies rivalled the first ape-men ever produced by Leech and Tenniel”. L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian caricature (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971), pp. 131, 135.
In 1860, the Cambridge historian, Charles Kingsley, wrote to his wife from Ireland: “But I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault, I believe that there are not only more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better, more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.” Michael Hechter Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (1536–1966) (California: University of California Press, 1975.), p. xvi.
- 22.
Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, p. 4.
Yeats passionately condemns Professors Dowden and J.P. Mahaffy of Trinity College Dublin for their lack of interest in emerging Irish literature (1886): “The most cultivated of Irish readers are only anxious to be academic, and to be servile to English notions.” Their critical ear, he finds, is exclusively attuned to “the faintest echo of English thought”.
“The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson 11”. The Dublin University Review (1886), rpt. in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. IX: Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews between 1886–1900, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, p. 12.
- 23.
Terence Brown suggests that these two doctrines, nationalism and the occult, may stem from a common impulse. Brown finds: “There is something obviously analogous to occultism about cultural nationalism in general. Both occultism and cultural nationalism involve belief in hidden realities which must be made manifest. The idea that the spirit of the people … which survives through countless ages and vicissitudes to link a modern democratic Christian people with their putative ancestors in pre-history involves a fair measure of simple credulity …” “Cultural Nationalism, Celticism and the Occult” in Celticism ed. Terence Brown (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1996), p. 222.
- 24.
Charles Hawtrey, The Truth at Last, ed. Somerset Maugham (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1924)), pp. 221–227. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 350.
- 25.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 30.
- 26.
Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 294.
- 27.
E.H. Mikhail ed., “An interview with Mr. W.B. Yeats” by Hugh Lunn. First published in Hearth and Home (London: Nov., 28, 1912). Collected in W.B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections Vol. I, (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 88.
- 28.
W.B. Yeats, “Wilde: The Happy Prince” in Prefaces and Introductions. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume VI, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 148. See also Noreen Doody, “Yeats and Wilde: Nation and Identity” in New Voices in Irish Criticism, P.J. Mathews. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 27–33.
- 29.
“Plays that can seem simply clever, opportunistic exploitations of current theatrical fashions … or simply vehicles for Wilde’s epigrammatic wit, are amongst the most devastating of studies of the bases of English society at the moment when its masters ruled the world”. Terence Brown, Intro., The Plays in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (1948; rpt. Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 351.
- 30.
Robert Ross, Prefatory Dedication, De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908), p. x. See also: appendix 3, “Ross’s prefatory matter to, and appendices for, the 1908 edition of De Profundis”, p. 313. Ed. Ian Small. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume II: De Profundis; Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). This edition will be used in all further references to Wilde’s De Profundis, unless otherwise indicated. There are two texts in this edition: “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis”, which consists of Vyvyan Holland’s 1949 edition collated with Wilde’s ms. of De Profundis held in the British Library and a typescript, which the editor suggests, was used as a copy-script by Holland, and which is held in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, L.A. The second text is named “De Profundis” and is made up of the edition edited by Robert Ross in 1905, collated with the edition he edited in 1908.
- 31.
W.B. Yeats, “Oscar Wilde’s Last Book” in Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews between 1886–1900. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. IX, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, p. 144.
- 32.
This mindset was equally applicable to the English. In Apes and Angels, L. Perry Curtis writes: “Most respectable Victorians believed in a natural opposition between an Anglo-Saxon ‘Us’ and a Gaelic or Celtic ‘Them’, which was reinforced by the great religious divide between Protestantism and (Roman) Catholicism”, pp. xi, xii
- 33.
W.B. Yeats, “Oscar Wilde’s Last Book” in Early Articles and Reviews: uncollected articles and reviews between 1886–1900. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. IX, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, p. 144.
- 34.
Oscar Wilde, “Letter to George Bernard Shaw (23rd February 1893) in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, p. 554.
George Bernard Shaw, “Review of An Ideal Husband”, Saturday Review, 1895, lxxix, pp. 44–45; rpt., in Shaw’s Our Theatres in the Nineties Vol. I (London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1931), p. 10. Rpt. in ed. Karl Beckson, Oscar Wilde: the Critical Heritage, London: Routledge: 1970), pp. 199–200, p. 199.
Ian Small and Josephine Guy question the usefulness of critical enquiry into the cultural context into which Wilde was born. Rather than seeing the recent scholarship on Wilde’s nationality as another means of exploring the writer’s work, they somehow feel it threatens a total understanding of Wilde. “Wilde the Writer” in Oscar Wilde’s Profession – Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–13.
- 35.
W.B. Yeats, New York Daily News, 4th March 1904.
- 36.
Declan Kiberd writes: “As Hegel had observed, the losers of history, in learning what it is to lose, learn also what it must be like to win: they have no choice but to know their masters even better than the masters know themselves. To them, the masters (though tyrants) remain always human, but to the masters the subjects are not human, not persons, not really there at all. Hope therefore comes from the initiatives launched by the slaves.” Inventing Ireland, p. 44.
- 37.
W.B. Yeats, “Edmund Spenser” in “The Cutting of an Agate”. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. IV: Early Essays, ed. Richard Finneran and George Bornstein, p. 268.
- 38.
W.B. Yeats, “Introduction (w. 1937)” in Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 211; published as “A General Introduction for my Work”, in Essays and Introductions (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1961), p. 519.
- 39.
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband in The Plays in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (1948; rpt. Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994), p. 564.
- 40.
Oscar Wilde, “Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century: unpublished lecture notes of Oscar Wilde,” in University Review, 1, No. 4 (Spring 1955), ed. Michael J. O’Neill, p. 29.
- 41.
David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), p. 45.
Yeats quotes Wilde’s neat inversion of the colonizer’s image of Ireland as a drunken, lewd people: “Beer, bible and the seven deadly virtues have made England what she is to-day.” “Oscar Wilde’s Last Book” in Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews between 1886–1900. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. IX, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, p. 143.
- 42.
Deception and subversion have often been employed as tactics of survival and protection in minority groupings. For discussion of this in relation to power relations between gay and straight communities, see Valli Kalei Kanuha (2015) “The Social Process of ‘Passing’ to Manage Stigma: Acts of Internalized Oppression or Acts of Resistance?”, The Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare: Vol. 26: Iss. 4, Article 3. Available at: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol26/iss4/3. See Bell Hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery for discussion of dissimulation as a necessity to survival for black people during slavery and days of legal racial apartheid in the Southern States of the United States.
- 43.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 29.
- 44.
Letter to artist Philip Houghton in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis and Merlin Holland, p. 586.
- 45.
Declan Kiberd, “Anglo-Irish Attitudes” in Ireland’s Field Day (1983; rpt. London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. 85.
- 46.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 447.
- 47.
See Thomas Wright and Paul Kinsella on Wilde’s nationalism, The Eighty Club and Wilde’s trials in “Oscar Wilde, A Parnellite Home Ruler and Gladstonian Liberal: Wilde’s career at the Eighty Club (1887–1895)”. The Oscholars.
https://oscholars.files.wordpress.com/.../wright-kinsella-on-wilde-2.docx.
- 48.
Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse” in Location of Culture (Aldershot: Scolar, c1995), p. 88. See also Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986).
- 49.
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (2005), ed. Ian Small: “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis”, pp. 83, 95, 83 and “De Profundis”, pp. 160 (1905, 1908), 162 (1908), 159 (1905, 1908).
- 50.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 229.
- 51.
Sybil Bristowe, “Mr. W.B. Yeats: Poet and Mystic”. First published in T.P’s Weekly (4th April 1913). Collected in W.B. Yeats; Interviews and Recollections Vol. 1, p. 93. See also interesting discussion on Yeats’s perspectives on the relationship between Wilde’s talk and his writing in Paul Kinsella, chapter one of his unpublished thesis, “’We must return to the voice’: Oral Traditions and Values in the Works of Oscar Wilde” (University of British Columbia, 2003).
- 52.
W.B. Yeats, “Wilde: The Happy Prince” in Prefaces and Introductions. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume VI, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 148. Lillie Langtry writes of Wilde’s Irish cadence: “He had one of the most alluring voices that I have ever listened to, round and soft, and full of variety and expression, and the cleverness of his remarks received added value from his manner of delivering them.” Lillie Langtry, The Days I Knew, California: Panoply Publications, 2000, p. 76.
- 53.
W.B. Yeats, “Oscar Wilde’s Last Book” in Early Articles and Reviews: uncollected articles and reviews between 1886–1900. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. IX, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, p. 144.
- 54.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 130.
- 55.
W.B. Yeats, “Wilde: The Happy Prince” in Prefaces and Introductions. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume VI, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 150.
- 56.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 130.
- 57.
Yeats states categorically: “Wilde was not a snob.” Hugh Kingsmill, “Meeting with Yeats” in Interviews and Recollections, Vol. II, p. 295. Wilde was relentless in his critique of the faults and foibles of English society. Kiberd points out that Wilde’s “strictures against English dullness” can be read as “an inflection on Arnold’s critique of Philistine middle-class pragmatism and gradgrindery”. Personal communication.
- 58.
File HO 45/24516, Public Records Office, Kew. The file is entitled “The Case of Lord Alfred Douglas” and marked “To remain secret 100 years”. The letter is dated 19th April 1995.
- 59.
Hugh Kingsmill, “Meeting with Yeats” in Interviews and Recollections, Vol. II, p. 295.
- 60.
“Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonial disavowal, so that often ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition.” Homi Bhabha, “Signs taken for wonders: questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” The Location of Culture, p. 114.
- 61.
George Bernard Shaw, Review of An Ideal Husband, ed. Karl Beckson, p. 199.
- 62.
W.B. Yeats, “J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time” in Early Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. IV, ed. Richard Finneran and George Bornstein, p. 244.
- 63.
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan in The Plays in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 433.
- 64.
W.B. Yeats, “The Irish Dramatic Movement” (1905), in Samhain (October 1901–November 1908), Numbers One to Seven, Reprinted in one volume, edited by W.B. Yeats (London: Frank Cass and Co., Ltd., 1970), p. 12.
- 65.
W.B. Yeats, “Oscar Wilde’s Last Book” in Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews between 1886–1900. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. IX, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, p. 144.
- 66.
Oscar Wilde, “Mr. Froude’s Blue-Book [on Ireland]”, review of the “The Two Chiefs of Dunboyne” by J.A. Froude in The Pall Mall Gazette, (13th April 1889). Collected in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume VII: Journalism II, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 203.
- 67.
E.H. Mikhail, ed., Interviews and Recollections, 1, p. 89.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Ibid.
- 70.
W.B. Yeats, “A Reckless Century: Irish Rakes and Duellists”. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. VI: Early Articles and Reviews: uncollected articles and reviews between 1886–1900, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, pp. 139–142. While Whaley did in fact travel to Jerusalem for a wager, playing ball against the ramparts of the city seems to be apocryphal.
- 71.
W.B. Yeats, “Wilde: The Happy Prince” in Prefaces and Introductions. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume VI, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 148.
- 72.
See Sos Eltis’s searching appraisal of Wilde as socialist and anarchist in Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
- 73.
See for example: Declan Kiberd, “Wilde and the Belfast Agreement”, in Textual Practice 13.3, ed. Alan Sinfield (London: Methuen and Co., 1999), 441–445.
- 74.
W.B. Yeats, Memoirs ed. Denis Donoghue, p. 79.
- 75.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 229. See more on Wilde making use of the theatre to express his critical views in Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995, p. 244.
- 76.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 45.
- 77.
Davis Coakley, Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House and Country House, 1994), p. 206.
- 78.
Said defines nationalism as “the mobilizing force that coalesced into resistance against an alien and occupying empire on the part of people’s possessing a common history, religion and language”. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 269.
- 79.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 13.
- 80.
At the time, it was forbidden for any stage production to contain material from the Bible. The Examiner of Plays, Edward F. Smyth, refused to grant the play a licence on these grounds. See William Tydeman and Steven Price, Oscar Wilde: Salomé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 22, 23.
- 81.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 352.
- 82.
Anonymous, “A Wilde Idea”, Punch (9th July 1892), p. 1.
- 83.
Oscar Wilde, “Mr. Froude’s Blue-Book [on Ireland]”, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume VII: Journalism II, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, p. 206.
- 84.
Ibid., p. 203.
- 85.
Lady Wilde, Poems by Speranza (Dublin/London: James Duffy, 1864).
- 86.
W.B. Yeats, “1903 American Lecture”. N.L.I. Microfiche 30,627.
- 87.
Owen Dudley Edwards, “Oscar Wilde and Henry O’Neill” in The Irish Book (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1959–‘1962), pp. 15, 18.
- 88.
Joy Melville, Mother of Oscar: The Life of Jane Francesca Wilde (London: John Murray, 1994), p. 36.
- 89.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 186.
- 90.
Oscar Wilde, “Mr. Froude’s Blue-Book [on Ireland]”, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume VII: Journalism II, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, p. 204.
- 91.
Oscar Wilde. Autograph Letter Signed to an unidentified correspondent, discussing the Irish Famine, 16 Tite Street. Creation dates: [1887–1889] British Library Board, Manuscript Reference: RP 6928.
- 92.
Lady Wilde, Preface to “Concluding Portion of The Memoir of Gabriel Beranger” in Sir William Wilde’s Memoir of Gabriel Beranger and His Labours in the Cause of Irish Art and Antiquities from 1760 to 1780 (Dublin: Gill and Son, 1880), p. 131.
- 93.
Oscar Wilde, a review of “Early Christian Art in Ireland” by Margaret Stokes. Pall Mall Gazette (17th December 1887). Collected in A Critic in Pall Mall: being extracts from reviews and miscellanies by Oscar Wilde, 2nd edition (London: Methuen, 1919), pp. 82, 83. See also Noreen Doody, “Oscar Wilde: Landscape, Memory and Imagined Space” in Irish Landscapes, eds. José Francisco Fernández Sánchez and M.A. Elena Jaime de Pablos (Almería: Universidad de Almería, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2003), pp. 179, 180, 181.
- 94.
Oscar Wilde, “The Case of Mr. Henry O’Neill” in The Nation, 12th January 1879, p. 11.
- 95.
Oscar Wilde, “Some Literary Notes”. Collected in The Rare Oscar Wilde, ed. John Wyse Jackson, p. 153.
- 96.
Oscar Wilde, “Mr. Yeats’ Wanderings of Oisin”, review, Pall Mall Gazette (12th July 1889). Collected in A Critic in Pall Mall, p. 161.
- 97.
W.B. Yeats, “Four Years” Ms., Michael Yeats Collection, N.L.I., microfiche 30,536, p. 34.
- 98.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 128. On Wilde, Yeats and Irish oral culture, see Deirdre Toomey, “The Story-Teller at Fault: Oscar Wilde and Irish Orality” in Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha MacCormack (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).
- 99.
W.B. Yeats, Letter to Katharine Tynan, 27th April 1887. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Vol. I: 1865–1895. Eds., John Kelly and Eric Domville, p. 10.
- 100.
“True nationality in art meant the people selecting the flowers and birds of their own countries and using them as a mode of expression” Oscar Wilde, “The Value of Art in Modern Life”, The Irish Times (7th January 1885), p. 3.
- 101.
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 2.
- 102.
W.B. Yeats, “The New National Library” in Letters to the New Island: A New Edition (The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. VII). Eds. George Bornstein and Hugh Weitmeyer, (1934; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 66.
- 103.
Murray Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 11.
- 104.
Terence Brown, The Life of W.B. Yeats, p. 63.
- 105.
Oscar Wilde. Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, Letter to GBS (23rd February 1893), p. 554. Letter to Wilde from GBS (8th May 1893), p. 563.
Although George Bernard Shaw would “question the racial construction of a common Celtic identity”, he derived great encouragement from Wilde including him in “the great Celtic school” at a time when he had yet to prove himself and “was still a nobody in the theatre with only two forgettable performances of a single play to his credit”. David Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook (London: Palgrave, 2015), p. 143. Stanley Weintraub, Shaw’s People: Victoria to Churchill (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1996), p. 54.
- 106.
Letter to Grant Allen (Feb. 1891). An article by Allen, “The Celt in English Art”, had appeared in The Fortnightly Review (Feb. 1891) alongside Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism ”. Oscar Wilde, Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 470.
Wright and Kinsella rightly observe the central importance of this letter in relation to Wilde’s political standing in London, “This letter places Wilde right at the centre of London politics, socially as well as geographically.” “May I Say Nothing?” The Oscholars. Note iii, p. 23.
- 107.
Joep Leerssen, “Celticism” in Celticism, ed. Terence Brown, p. 17. See also Murray Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image, p. 11.
- 108.
Declan Kiberd, “A New England called Ireland?” Inventing Ireland, Chapter 1, pp. 9–32.
- 109.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume III, ed. Joseph Bristow, p. 320.
- 110.
Letter to Georgina Weldon (31/05/1898) in The Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 1080.
- 111.
W.B. Yeats, “Dr. Todhunter’s Latest Volume of Poems” first appeared in The Providence Sunday Journal, (10th February, 1889) under the heading, “The Literary World. Book Reviews and News”. Letters to the New Island: A New Edition (The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. VII)., ed. George Bornstein and Hugh Weitmeyer, p. 89.
- 112.
Terence Brown, “From Celts to rough beasts: Terence Brown on W.B. Yeats and the Ireland of his time” in Irish Times 10th June 2015. Quote from W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Element in Literature, 1898.
- 113.
“There is no song or story handed down among the cottages that has not words and thoughts to carry one as far, for though one can know but a little of their ascent, one knows that they ascend like mediaeval genealogies through unbroken dignities to the beginning of the world … Folk-art is indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted.” W.B. Yeats, “By the Roadside” (1901) in The Celtic Twilight in Mythologies, ed. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 91.
- 114.
W.B. Yeats, “The Poet of Ballyshannon” first appeared in The Providence Sunday Journal (2nd September 1888). Letters to the New Island: A New Edition (The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. VII), ed. George Bornstein and Hugh Weitmeyer, p. 78.
- 115.
W. B. Yeats, “A General Introduction to My Work”. Collected in Essays and Introductions, p. 510; published as “Introduction (w. 1937)” in Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, p. 205.
Yeats’s poem, “To Ireland in the Coming Times” expresses a similar sentiment.
- 116.
Oscar Wilde, extracts: [119] and [121] from his Oxford Common Place Book in Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith and Michael Helfand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 129,130.
- 117.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 186.
- 118.
Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume IV, ed. Josephine M. Guy, pp. 177, 190, 191.
- 119.
W.B. Yeats, Per Amica Silentia Lunae in Later Essays. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V, ed. William H. O’Donnell, pp. 1–33.
- 120.
W.B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue, p. 156.
- 121.
W.B. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson 11” (1886). Collected in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. IX: Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews between 1886–1900, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, p. 26.
- 122.
Grant Allen, “The Celt in English Art” in The Fortnightly Review (Feb. 1891), in The Oxford Notebooks, p. 81.
- 123.
W.B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue, p. 80.
- 124.
Mathew Kelly, “Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s”, p. 137.
- 125.
Hugh Kingsmill, “Meeting with Yeats” in Interviews and Recollections, Vol. 11, p. 295.
- 126.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 225; W.B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue, pp. 79, 80.
- 127.
George Bernard Shaw, “Oscar Wilde”, The Matter with Ireland. Trans. by Dr. Felix F. Strauss and Mr. Laurence (London: Hart-Davis, 1962), p. 30.
- 128.
W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, p. 226.
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Doody, N. (2018). “A Provincial Like Myself”: Yeats, Wilde and the Politics of Identity. In: The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W.B. Yeats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89548-2_3
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