Abstract
Cuchulain, the hero of Yeats’ play cycle, was a personage of considerable symbolic importance to the Irish nationalist movement. It was to Standish O’Grady that Yeats gave credit for reintroducing to modern Ireland the Old Gaelic epics in which Cuchulain is the dominant figure. ‘ “It is that famous man Cuchulain….” In the eighties of the last century Standish O’Grady, his mind full of Homer, retold the story of Cuchulain that he might bring back an heroic ideal.’1
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Notes
Phillip L. Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970) p. 235.
W. B. Yeats, Letters to the New Island, ed. Horace Reynolds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934) p. 159.
Cf. Thomas P. O’Neill, “The Springs of 1916”, Goddard Lieberson (ed.), The Irish Uprising: 1916–1922 (New York: CBS Records, 1966) p. 1.
Padraic H. Pearse, Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse — Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin: Phoenix Publishing Co., 1917) p. 91.
Giles W. L. Telfer, “Yeats’s Idea of the Gael”, Liam Miller (ed.), The Dolmen Press Yeats Centenary Papers MCMLXV (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1968) p. 101.
Padraic H. Pearse, Collected Works of Padraic N. Pearse — Songs of the Irish Rebels, etc. (Dublin: Phoenix Publishing Co., 1917) pp. 229–30.
Myles Dillon (ed.), Irish Sagas (Cork: Mercier Press, 1968) p. 17.
Lady Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (London: John Murray, 1902) p. 38.
Padraic H. Pearse, Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse — Plays, Stories, Poems (Dublin: Phoenix Publishing Co., 1917) p. 334.
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© 1974 Reg Skene
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Skene, R. (1974). That Famous Man Cuchulain. In: The Cuchulain Plays of W. B. Yeats. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02220-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02220-5_2
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