Abstract
W. B. Yeats ’s first published article, ‘The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson’, originally carried a more inclusive title, ‘Irish Poets and Irish Poetry’, and appeared in The Irish Fireside of October 9, 1886.
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Notes
- 1.
In Four Years, Yeats defines Unity of Being after Dante but recalls that his father, ‘from whom I had learned the term, preferred a comparison to a musical instrument so strung that if we touch a string all the strings murmur faintly’ (CW3 164). The association of Unity of Being with music is also used in the Sleep and Dream Notebooks: ‘[Unity of Being] is a harmony. All the being vibrates to the note, it is like striking a chord. It is like sounding on the piano certain harmonic notes which are responded to by others in their sequence’ (YVP3 27). In an article in praise of Maud Gonne , ‘The New Speranza’, he used the reference to ‘Aeolian Harp’ to emphasise Gonne’s completeness as a speaker (UP1 214), thereby adapting the Romantic and Victorian trope to his own, in this case, nationalist ends. See Matthew Gibson , Yeats, Coleridge and the Romantic Sage (London: Macmillan, 2000), 152–153.
- 2.
Anonymous review of Stories from Carleton, Nation 28 (December 1899), 4.
- 3.
The varying degrees of influence on Yeats of these Irish poets, particularly, Ferguson, is traced by Peter Denman , ‘Ferguson and Yeats’, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies XII (1994), 78–94.
- 4.
Phillip L. Marcus , Yeats and Artistic Power (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 38.
- 5.
In his essay on ‘Heroic Styles’, Seamus Deane observes that the narratives spun by Yeats, Joyce and Padraig Pearse ‘are all based on the ideological conviction that a community exists which must be recovered and restored’. This restoration, according to Deane, took place in literature that ‘is self-consciously adversarial’ in that what it did in its time and does now is oppose clichéd notions of Irishness, proffering antithetical ways of conceiving of the nation. ‘Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea’ in Theorizing Ireland, ed. Claire Connolly (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 21.
- 6.
Yug Mohit Chaudhry , Yeats: The Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 126.
- 7.
Ibid., 112.
- 8.
See Barry Sheils, W. B. Yeats and World Literature: The Subject of Poetry (Farnham: Ashgte, 2015), 88–100.
- 9.
Ibid., 129.
- 10.
P. J. Mathews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, The Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 25–6. See Michael McAteer , Yeats and European Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2–3.
- 11.
Chaudhry, Yeats, 92.
- 12.
Mathews, Revival, 21.
- 13.
Yeats hinted at the actual authorship by including ‘Girl’s Song’, already published in The Wanderings of Oisin. He told Father Russell, ‘I want it to be known as mine—the poem at page 187 is in my book of poems so the disguise is not very deep’ (CL1 268). See also Richard J. Finneran, Editor’s Introduction to W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XII: John Sherman and Dhoya, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1993), xiii–xvii.
- 14.
See Chaudhry, Yeats, 136–7.
- 15.
Katherine O’Donnell , ‘Edmund Burke’s Political Poetics’ in Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture, ed. Nessa Cronin, Seán Crosson and John Eastlake (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 181.
- 16.
Marjorie Howes , Yeats’s Nations: Nation, Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2.
- 17.
In late August 1889, Yeats told Ernest Rhys that Duffy ‘promises me unpublished letters of Clarence Mangans’ (CL1 184), a topic to which he returned every now and then. In March 1890, Yeats wrote to Duffy concerning Mangan’s letters and ‘a lecture on Mangan as a preliminary to writing a study of him for a projected little book on Irish literature that has been long in my mind’ (CL1 214–15). In Autobiographies, Yeats recalls that when he arrived, Duffy ‘brought with him much manuscript, the private letters of a Young Ireland poetess, a dry but informing unpublished historical essay by Davis, and an unpublished novel by William Carleton […]’ (CW3 186).
- 18.
Roy F. Foster , Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 88.
- 19.
Charles Gavan Duffy, ‘What Irishmen May Do for Irish Literature’ in The Revival of Irish Literature. Addresses by Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, K. C. M. G., Dr. George Sigerson, and Dr. Douglas Hyde (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 12.
- 20.
Ibid., 17.
- 21.
Ibid., 24, 30.
- 22.
Quoted in Foster, Words Alone, 1.
- 23.
John F. Taylor, Letter to the Freeman’s Journal, 7 (September 1892), 5.
- 24.
See CL1 312–14.
- 25.
Yeats’s estimation of Taylor is interesting for its ambiguity. Even though there was no mistaking his dislike for Taylor, he admired his gifts: ‘When Taylor spoke, it was a great event, and his delivery in the course of a speech or lecture of some political verse by Thomas Davis gave me a conviction of how great might be the effect of verse, spoken by a man almost rhythm-drunk, at some moment of intensity, the apex of long-mounting thought’ (CW3 103). In 1908, he put O’Leary and Taylor on a similar footing, calling both men of genius and admitting that ‘it is easier for me to understand his anger in this year than thirteen years ago when the lofty thought of men like Taylor and O’Leary was the strength of Irish nationality’ (CW6 110). Elsewhere, Yeats attributed their dislike for each other to his jealousy of Maud Gonne (Mem 65), a view corroborated by Foster (Life1 44).
- 26.
Gonne repeatedly uses this term to refer to her political views in her autobiography The Servant of the Queen.
- 27.
Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats (Malden: Blackwell‚ 2001), 86.
- 28.
Foster, Words Alone, 140.
- 29.
Friedrich Nietzsche , Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 71. At the same time it must be noted that Yeats also falls into the trap of monumentalism when he comes to believe that ‘Irish national identity can unify around a heroic figure as we see in his involvement with the 1898 Commemoration Committee’. G. Higgins, Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats (London: Palgrave, 2012), 108.
- 30.
Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 70.
- 31.
Ibid., 79–80.
- 32.
Ibid., 93.
- 33.
Charles Gavan Duffy , ‘Books for the Irish People’ in The Revival of Irish Literature, 42–3.
- 34.
John McGrath , ‘Review of P. J. MacCall’s Irish Nóiníns’ (10 November 1894), 1.
- 35.
Later, in a dedication to Early Poems and Stories (1925), Yeats remembered Ashe King’s lecture as ‘a denunciation of rhetoric, and of Irish rhetoric most of all’. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Alt and Russel K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 854.
- 36.
Edward FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, trans. T. N. Foulis (Edinburgh and London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), stanza L.
- 37.
Oscar Wilde , ‘The Decay of Lying’, in Intentions (London: The Unicorn Press, 1948), 46, 35.
- 38.
Ibid., 23. Wilde provides the example of fog that is seen ‘because poets and painters have taught [people] the mysterious loveliness of such effects’ (37). Less willing to shock, Yeats gives an anthropological example of how poetry influenced the way people lived, reaching an equal status with the strength of arms, in his review of Sophie Bryant’s Celtic Ireland, ‘when St. Patrick had Christianised the country another kind of conquest began, and England, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, and France, owed their Christianity mainly to the Irish missions. […] The bards […] rode hither and thither gathering up the dim feelings of the time, and making them conscious’ (UP1 163). Therefore Christianity, according to Yeats, is in fact the product of the skillful Celtic bards, who first turned the stories of the Bible into powerful and passionate tales that were duly adapted by the people.
- 39.
The full version of the essay, containing a pertinent reference to Wilde, is available online (http://olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/rorty.pdf—accessed 12.15.2015) but an abridged version is included in Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007), 89–104.
- 40.
Richard Rorty , ‘Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism’, in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 140.
- 41.
Ibid., 141.
- 42.
Richard Rorty , Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 12.
- 43.
Ibid., 53.
- 44.
Yeats’s occasionally bizarre literary preferences resulted from attempts to be consistent with some of his beliefs, although when he occasionally lets his instinct speak, his perceptions prove insightful (his championing of complete unknowns like Lady Gregory, Synge and Joyce, and in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse of Hugh MacDiarmid).
- 45.
Richard Rorty , Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 109.
- 46.
Smith, Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity, 34.
- 47.
Quoted in Richard Ellmann , Yeats: The Man and the Masks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 19.
- 48.
Quoted in Ellmann, The Man and the Masks, 18. In a letter to Oliver Eton, J. B. Yeats expressed his partiality to ‘incomplete men’: ‘all qualities […] in excess’. John Butler Yeats, Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, ed. Joseph Hone (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 61. By the early 1890s, Yeats fils had already shaken off some of his father’s influences like his interest in J. S. Mill; also, the idea of incompleteness, though it would become one of the hallmarks of Yeats’s theory of the self, seems to have been discarded in favour of its opposite, especially when the figure of completion was represented by Maud Gonne (see Mem 63). See Alexander N. Jeffares, The Circus Animals: Essays on W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1970), 117–46 and Douglas Archibald , ‘John Butler Yeats’, in W. B. Yeats in Context, 109–118.
- 49.
The quotation from Yeats closes Rorty’s essay ‘Pragmatism and Romanticism’, 119.
- 50.
Friedrich Nietzsche , ‘On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense”, in: Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, trans. Sander L. Gilman, et al. (London: Oxford University Press, 1989), 250. See Ronad Schleiffer , ‘Yeats’s Postmodern Rhetoric’, in: Yeats and Postmodernism, ed. Leonard Orr (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 21–4.
- 51.
Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 118.
- 52.
William Wordsworth , ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour’ in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, ed. Mary Jo Salter (New York: Norton, 2005), 767, ll. 105–7.
- 53.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’ in Shelley: Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters, ed. A.S.B. Glover (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1951), 139, ll. 139–41.
- 54.
AE (George Russell), Homeward: Songs by the Way (London and New York: John Lane, 1894), 57.
- 55.
Ellmann, The Man and the Masks, 42.
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Pietrzak, W. (2017). Popular Audiences and Poetical Culture. In: The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60089-5_2
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