Abstract
Over two centuries separate these quotations, which establish the standpoint of this investigation of one aspect of Yeats’s claim that all his art theories (by implication his literary practice) depend on “rooting of mythology in the earth”, that aspect being the poems on Coole Park.1 While his contribution to the genre of country-house poetry appears now a matter of critical consensus, critical evaluation of that contribution in the context of Irish writing in English is curiously lacking.2
Meanwhile, the country houses lit a chain of bonfires through the nights of late summer and autumn and winter and early spring. …People whose families had lived in the country for three or four hundred years realised suddenly that they were still strangers and that the mystery of it was not to be revealed to them — the secret lying as deep as the hidden valleys in the Irish hills, the barriers they had tried to break down standing as strong and immoveable as those hills, brooding over an age-old wrong. Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall, Seventy Years Young (London, 1937) p. 414.
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Notes
See Daniel A. Harris, Yeats: Coole Park and Ballylee, (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1974).
Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat: the English Country House and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971).
Donald R. Pearce (ed.), The Senate Speeches of W. B. Yeats (London: Faber, 1961) p. 99.
L. P. Curtis, Jr., “The Anglo-Irish Predicament”, 20th Century Studies, 4 (November 1970) p. 61. The late Professor F. S. L. Lyons reminded me that the loyalty was not unconditional, and instances the activity of the Patriot Party after 1782. When the Ascendancy felt its position to be threatened, it qualified its commitment, and this, of course, was increasingly the case throughout the nineteenth century. I was grateful to him for this reminder.
Maurice Harmon, “Cobwebs before the Wind”, in Views of the Irish Peasantry, Daniel J. Casey and Robert E. Rhodes (eds) (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1977) p. 141.
H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Administration of Ireland 1172–1377 (Dublin: Stationery Office for the Irish Manuscripts Comm., 1963) p. 69. I adapt their comment on the Anglo-Norman period, and am grateful to Reverend Father Benignus Millett, O. F. M., who brought this study to my attention. “I read the Anglo-Irish literature of the last century before the Gaelic tradition was made known by the labour of scholars and I find it arid and empty of spiritual life”, Ireland Past and Present (London: 1922) p. 10.
Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (London: Faber, 1941, re-issued with a foreword by Richard Ellmann, 1967) p. 97.
C. Day Lewis, “A Note on W. B. Yeats and the Aristocratic Tradition”, Scattering Branches, Stephen Gwynn (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1940) p. 176.
T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower (London: Methuen, 1950) pp. 7, 8.
Op. cit., 1901, p. 517. The Gaelic literary achievement found a guarded response from Stephen Gwynn and Frank O’Connor. Gwynn wrote: “However much worth there is which survives of their work may be questioned; certainly it is not all high poetry”, but he added “it is all educated work [written] for the learned” (Irish Literature and Drama in the English Language [London: 1936] p. 26).
O’Connor while admitting “this is not a culture which appeals to me” also agrees “it was a real culture, a purely aristocratic culture” (The Backward Look, [1967] p. 86). For a better sense of the achievement see The Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry, (Sean MacRēamoin (ed.) [1982]), especially David Greene’s magisterial essay, “The Bardic Mind” (pp. 37–62), where the skill of the bards in articulating a personal voice within an arduous discipline is demonstrated.
Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland, (Dublin: Gill, 1925).
Brendan Bradshaw, “ ‘Manus the Magnificent’: O’Donnell as Renaissance Prince” in Studies in Irish History, Art Cosgrove and Donal McCartney (eds) (University College Dublin, 1979) p. 19.
Bradshaw develops with excessive warmth an insight of Edmund Curtis in his A History of Medieval Ireland (2nd edn, 1938) p. 366. “Yeats found his Irish Urbino in Coole demesne. … As he and Lady Gregory spent their summer evenings reading about the brilliant company gathered centuries earlier in the Italian palace, they could not but realise that they were in an Irish Urbino”, Yeats and Castiglione (Dublin, 1965) p. 22.
The Bardic Poems of Tadhg Dall Ō Huiginn, Eleanor Knott (ed.) (Irish Texts Soc., xxiii [1921] 1926) ii, 24, ll. 1–4, 21–4, 15, 28. I have to thank Ant Athair Micheal Mac Craith O. F. M. for this reference.
Op. cit., p. 167, 11. 27–8. Declan Kiberd in his useful “The Perils of Nostalgia: a Critique of the Revival” in Literature and the Changing Ireland, Peter Connolly (ed.) (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982) pp. 1–24, suggests these lines as the source of Yeats’s And there is an old beggar wandering in his pride — His fathers served their fathers before Christ was crucified (VP 580, and see also 544).
Tim was Away, Terence Brown and Alec Reid (eds) (Dublin: Dolmen, 1974) pp. 1–2, ll. 30–9.
Parnell and his Island (London: 1887) pp. 7–8; Modern Ireland and Her Agrarian Problem (London: 1906) p. 65. Moore states the traditional view of landlord-tenant relations, a view shared by Parnell, Davitt and Butt, and consistently supported by the evidence supplied in the several Reports of Parliamentary Commissions on the land question. This view has been the subject of lively debate since the publication in 1971, (in the Harvard Economic Series) of Barbara Lewis Solow’s The Land Question and the Irish Economy 1870–1903. Her primary data source was the Reports, but she ignores the evidence which would impugn her revisionist thesis, nor does she substantiate her observation “Perhaps in terms of prices and acres and rents and evictions the Irish landlord did nothing seriously to restrain economic development in Ireland” (op. cit., p. 202). Also revisionist in tendency is Peter Roebuck’s essay “Landlord Indebtedness in Ulster in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” in Irish Population, Economy and Society (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1981).
A corrective will be found in Irish Peasants, Violence, and Political Unrest 1780–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983). Of value, too, is Liam Kennedy’s “Studies in Irish Econometric History”, in Irish Historical Studies, xxm: 91 (May, 1983), where he states “Alas for splendid new historical possibilities, the would-be revisionists have slipped on the humble issue of appropriate tests of significance” (op. cit., p. 195).
Op. cit., p. 77, 11. 268–70. Two passages from Malcolm Brown’s essay “Allingham’s Ireland” in Irish University Review, 13:1 (Spring 1983), support the argument I am conducting. “Laurence Bloomfield’s most striking quality is lucidity, reinforced by expert knowledge, a liberal moral sensitivity, and Chaucerian realistic detail. What could be more un-Irish? What could be more disgusting?” (op. cit., p. 10). Allingham shows the landed gentry and aristocracy as “vulgar, ignorant, cruel, stupid, bigoted, degenerate, tasteless” (ibid., p. 13).
W. T. H., The Encumbered Estates of Ireland (London: 1850) p. 9.
Peter Ure, Yeats and Anglo-Irish Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1974) p. 191.
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© 1985 Warwick Gould
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Coleman, A. (1985). The Big House, Yeats, and the Irish Context. In: Gould, W. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 3. Yeats Annual. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06206-5_3
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