Yeats, Childhood and Exile

Abstract

Most writers of the Irish Revival identified their childhood with that of the nation, that hopeful period of growth before the fall into murderous violence and civil war. In their autobiographies, childhood is depicted as a kind of privileged zone, peopled by engaging eccentric uncles, doting grannies and natural landscapes. What they were all describing, of course, was childhood in a British colony, and there can be few experiences as intense as that of family life in such a setting. The subject people owes no allegiance to the state, its courts, its police, its festivals, and so all the energies which might in a freer society be dispersed over such wide areas are invested instead in the rituals of family life. As G. K. Chesterton remarked, ‘Wherever there is Ireland there is the family, and it counts for a great deal.’ ¹