Abstract
In a rejoinder to John McGrath , who tried to defend The Patriot Parliament, the first title released in the New Irish Library series, on the grounds of its commercial success, Yeats dismissed it by noting that the first issue of any series with so much publicity would have enjoyed such success and argued that the next volumes would not compel as much public attention.
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Notes
- 1.
John McGrath , Editorial: The Shadow of the Glen, 18 (August 1894), 1.
- 2.
Charles Gavan Duffy , Young Ireland. A Fragment of Irish History (London, Paris and New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin, 1880), 35–36.
- 3.
Duffy, Young Ireland, 56.
- 4.
Richard J. Finneran et. al., Letters to W. B. Yeats, Volume 1 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 4.
- 5.
T. W. Rolleston, ‘Professor Dowden and Sir Samuel Ferguson ’, Daily Express (21 January 1895), 4.
- 6.
Edward Dowden ‘To the Editor of the Daily Express’. Daily Express (22 January 1895), 4.
- 7.
Gregory Cusack , The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J. M. Synge (London: Routledge, 2010), 71.
- 8.
McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 52.
- 9.
Ibid., 55–6.
- 10.
Ibid., 54.
- 11.
Rita Felski , Uses of Literature (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 110.
- 12.
Ibid., 109.
- 13.
McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 47.
- 14.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On Life’ in Shelley. Selected Poetry, Prose and Letters, 973.
- 15.
Naturally this is a convenient arrangement, for Yeats’s interest in the occult responded more strongly to his father’s professed skepticism than to his political ventures. In this respect, he is closer to the truth in Reveries over Childhood and Youth: ‘My father’s unbelief had set me thinking about the evidences of religion’ (CW3 54). That desire for religion brought him as much to conceiving of poetry as ritual, as to seeking confirmation of his beliefs in the occult. Interestingly, the wording of the passage implies an ironic frame of mind on Yeats’s part, perhaps less pronounced than his father’s but, nevertheless, he notes that it ‘set him thinking’ as he will later observe that symbols ‘set the mind wandering from idea to idea, emotion to emotion’ (CW4 160). Such a repetition in a book he made a lot of effort to construct into a pattern is rather suggestive.
- 16.
John Millington Synge, The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge. Vol. 1, ed. Ann Saddlemyer, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 47.
- 17.
Gonne was furious and yet knew that Yeats was an important figure for her movement. In a letter of early July, she wrote that ‘our friendship must indeed be strong for me not to hate you, for you made me do the most cowardly thing I have ever done in my life’. However, the rest of the letter emphasizes that she appreciates his art and oral aptitude although she stated that ‘it is […] impossible for us ever to do any work together where there is likely to be excitement or physical danger’. Still, she ends by suggesting to Yeats where he should next employ his skills. The friendship is indisputable, though the motives on her part seem ambivalent (G-YL 72–3). Yeats was impressed by her courage and slightly dismissive of his lack of it, and her awareness of that fact; perhaps slightly ruefully, he admitted that ‘she is now the idol of the mob & deserves to be’ (CL2 117).
- 18.
See also Mem 117, CW3 296–7, Augusta (Lady) Gregory, Our Irish Theatre. A Chapter of Autobiography (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1914), 3–20.
- 19.
In May 1897, Yeats wrote to O’Leary that his recently-released Secret Rose ‘is at any rate an honest attempt to wards that aristocratic esoteric Irish literature, which has been my chief ambition. We have a literature for the people but nothing as yet for the few’ (CL2 104). The position of the bard in a religious society, as Yeats perceived Ireland to be, is captured in the sinister story ‘The Crucifixion of the Outcast’, where the abbot fears that the bard, ‘the mood to curse […] upon him’, would ‘teach his lines to the children, and the girls, and the robbers’; so he elects to have him crucified. W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959), 151. The bard dies being jeered at by the beggars, his pride all but stripped from him as it would be stripped from Cuchulain in Yeats’s last play.
- 20.
Lionel Pilkington , Theatre and the State in Twentieth-century Ireland: Cultivating the People (London: Routledge, 2001), 17.
- 21.
Mathews, Revival, 14, 17.
- 22.
Maud Gonne , ‘Yeats and Ireland’ in Scattering Branches: Tributes to the Memory of W. B. Yeats, ed. Stephen Gwynn (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 28.
- 23.
Adrian Frazier , ‘The Ideology of the Abbey Theatre’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century Irish Drama, ed. Shaun Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 35.
- 24.
As described in the Irish Daily Independent, 16 August 1898, 6.
- 25.
John Eglinton (William Kirkpatrick Magee), ‘National Drama and Contemporary Life’, in Literary Ideals in Ireland, ed. John Eglinton (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), 24.
- 26.
AE, ‘Literary Ideals in Ireland’, in Literary Ideals in Ireland, 51.
- 27.
William Larminie , ‘Legends as Material for Literature’, in Literary Ideals in Ireland, 64.
- 28.
Warwick Gould , ‘Yeats and Symbolism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 26.
- 29.
In a letter to Lady Gregory of 14 August, Yeats enthused over the reception he, Gonne and Amilcare Cipriani, the Italian revolutionary, had received at a meeting the previous night (CL2 261). Cipriani embodied the qualities that Yeats would later come to see as exemplary of the heroic ideal but at the time must have viewed with jealous resentment, ‘I am at Maud Gonne ’s hotel, and an Italian sympathizer, Cipriani, the friend of Garibaldi, is there, and though an old man now, he is the handsomest man I have ever seen. I am telling a ghost story in English at one end of the room, and he is talking politics in French at the other. Somebody says, “Yeats believes in ghosts,” and Cipriani interrupts for a moment his impassioned declamation to say in English, and with a magnificent movement and intonation, “As for me, I believe in nothing but cannon”’ (CW3 278–9).
- 30.
See CW3 330.
- 31.
Deirdre Toomey , ‘Labyrinths: Yeats and Maud Gonne ’ in Yeats and Women, ed. Deirdre Toomey (London: Macmillan, 1997), 7.
- 32.
Ibid., 4.
- 33.
Yeats responded on 5 April in the Freeman’s Journal, arguing that the ‘disparagement of Davis’ that O’Donnell had accused him of was due to the misquotation of his own words by a journalist (See CL2 387–8).
- 34.
Mathews, Revival, 44.
- 35.
Pilkington, Theatre and State in Twentieth-Century Ireland, 23.
- 36.
Ibid., 24.
- 37.
Adrian Frazier , Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 18–9.
- 38.
Ibid., 19.
- 39.
McAteer, Yeats and European Drama, 27.
- 40.
Much later in the poet’s life this became evident when he repeatedly pressed his wife’s instructors to explicate the nature of the relationship between Emer, Eithne and Cuchulain in The Only Jealousy of Emer. Although for George Yeats the questions were awkward, if not downright hurtful, for directly indicating how much her husband was still devoted to Maud and Iseult Gonne, for Yeats, it seems, the relationship between the characters in his play informed and was capable of explaining the intricate affairs of his own life.
- 41.
Pilkington, Theatre and State in Twentieth-Century Ireland, 29.
- 42.
Ronald Schuchard , The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 191.
- 43.
Ronald Schuchard , ‘ The Countess Cathleen and the Chanting of Verse, 1892–1912’, YA15, 53.
- 44.
Michael J. Sidnell, ‘Yeats’s “Written Speech”: Writing, Hearing and Performance’, YA11, 8.
- 45.
John Moulden , ‘Two Dimensions to Orality in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Discussion of the Functioning of Printed Ballads’ in Anáil an Bhéil Bheo. Orality and Modern Irish Culture, 52.
- 46.
Schuchard, The Last Minstrels, 193. This idea met with little support from the general public, whose response was summarized by Griffith: Yeats ‘would have [Seanchan] accept Caesar’s wages without rendering Caesar obedience, and would deem it virtue in him that he refuses to do so. […] As we watched the play, our sympathy went out to the honest soldier who wished to put the sword into the selfish old man who lay on the King’s steps intimidating where he could not convince’. Quoted in Cusack, The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama, 70.
- 47.
Paul Zumthor, ‘Pamięć i wspólnota’, in: Literatura ustna, trans. Maciej Abramowicz, ed. Przemysław Czapliński (Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2010), 155.
- 48.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 69. Ong explains primary orality as ‘the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print’ as opposed to ‘the “secondary orality” of present-day high technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television, and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print’. Orality and Literacy, 11.
- 49.
Marcus maintains that ‘Yeats was not content with merely letting his creative productions serve as exempla of the literary ideals he held in the 1880s and 1890s: he worked actively to transmit his ideals to others’. Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 61. The experiment with chanting of verse is a perfect example of how energetically Yeats popularized his ideas. See Schuchard, The Last Minstrels.
- 50.
R. B. Kershner , ‘Yeats/Bakhtin/Orality/Dyslexia’ in Yeats and Postmodernism, 186.
- 51.
Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux has shown that Yeats’s understanding of symbol is strictly connected with the visual arts, considering symbols in terms of colours as well as shades and subverting Lessing’s classical distinction between poetry and painting. Yeats and the Visual Arts (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 48.
- 52.
See Gould, ‘Yeats and Symbolism’, 21; Higgins, Heroic Revivals: From Carlyle to Yeats, 12.
- 53.
Thomas Carlyle , Sartor Resartus (Boston: The Athenaeum Press, 1896), 199.
- 54.
Sena, The Poet as Critic, 60–2.
- 55.
John Unterecker , A Reader’s Guide to William Butler Yeats (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1959), 34.
- 56.
Robert Snukal , High Talk: The Philosophical Poetry of W. B. Yeats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 61.
- 57.
William K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1982), 128.
- 58.
Vereen Bell , Yeats and the Logic of Formalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 23.
- 59.
Daniel Albright , ‘The Fool by the Pool’, YA7, 64. Rainer Emig notes in a similar vein that the golden bird, as a symbol of ‘transcendental permanence’, ‘is doomed to disappoint because of the structure of the symbol which always relies on actual phenomena as the source of its pictura’. Rainer Emig , Modernism in Poetry. Motivations, Structures and Limits (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 58.
- 60.
Nicholas Royle , Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 34. Elsewhere Royle discusses veering as an act of ‘swerving, whirling, flickering, proliferating affects and possibilities that are generated in reading: there is always more than one voice in a voice; tone is always altering, divided, a sort of differential vibration; silence is always more complex or ironic, more restless or elusive than we might think; point of view, despite its name, is never a single or unified instantiation of seeing; and focalization, likewise, is a veering of or between perspectives’. Veering, 28. This elucidation of ‘veering’, which obviously itself veers as it unfolds, reinforces Yeats’s statement that a symbol is comprised of ‘subtleties that have a new meaning every day’.
- 61.
See Gould, ‘Yeats and Symbolism’, 36–9.
- 62.
This idea is repeated towards the end of IGE in the increasingly unappealing essay ‘The Autumn of the Body ’, where Yeats claims that ‘we will not cease to write long poems , but rather […] we will write them more and more as our new belief makes the world plastic under our hands again’ (CW4 142). This plasticity of the world calls back to his metaphor of sealing the soft wax before it hardens.
- 63.
Yeats’s ironic skepticism of the symbol as a purveyor of truth may be traced to Shelley’s distrust of language that runs through his letters, essays like ‘On Life’, and the Defence itself. Keach argues that ‘on the one hand, Shelley wants to maintain a clear distinction between words and ideas, and to insist on the latter’s independent priority; on the other, the passage [from a letter to Godwin] is energized by his acknowledging, […] that words commonly hold a devastating power over “correspondent ideas”—that the machine of language […] is diabolical rather than blessed’. William Keach , ‘Romanticism and Language’ in The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 122.
- 64.
Joseph M. Hassett , W. B. Yeats and the Muses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 13.
- 65.
The character of the festival that seemed to transport the audience to the times the plays shown there depicted would then underlie the role that Yeats hoped the Abbey Theatre would play. As Donoghue observes, ‘It is clear that Yeats chose the theater—and founded the Abbey Theatre—as symbol of the Ireland he hoped to summon into existence. The consanguinity of theater oratory, and conversation made the Abbey, at least for a few years, the emblem of a culture he saw as oral and acoustic’. ‘Orality, Literacy, and Their Discontents’, New Literary History 27 (Winter 1997), 156.
- 66.
Kathryn R. Ludwigson , Edward Dowden (New York: Twayne, 1973), 129.
- 67.
Edward Dowden, Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2013), 159, 213.
- 68.
Gary Taylor , Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 215.
- 69.
Quoted in Oliver Hennessey , Yeats, Shakespeare and Irish Cultural Nationalism (Lanham: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), 54–5.
- 70.
Adam Putz , The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Ireland, 1867–1922 (London: Palgrave, 2013), 92–3.
- 71.
In Ireland after Parnell, Yeats accuses Dowden of ‘turn[ing] Shakespeare into a British Benthamite’ (CW3 193).
- 72.
Arnold pigeonholes the Celt and so maintains that race’s inferiority to the Anglo-Saxon. Yeats uses the description against Arnold by showing that the qualities he listed are decisive in granting the Celt a hegemonic position over the Anglo-Saxon. To make his case stronger, Yeats silently misquotes Arnold, adding the adjectives ‘passionate, turbulent, indomitable’ to Arnold’s plain statement.
- 73.
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, 171–2.
- 74.
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist, 227.
- 75.
Corcoran aptly observes that ‘in “At Stratford-on-Avon ” Yeats discovers […] an alternative Arnoldian Celtic, or Irish, Richard II; which has its potentially undermining ironies, since in Shakespeare it is Richard’s absence in Ireland attempting to subdue a rebellion […] that gives Bolingbroke his opportunity. This is something that the Yeatsian editorial process simply ignores. To say, nevertheless, that for Yeats Henry V is an Irish unionist and Richard II a romantic Irish nationalist would be to caricature an opposition which Yeats’s essay finesses and complicates: but it would not be an inherent injustice to what may be extracted from the essay as its intrinsic ideological opposition’. Neil Corcoran , Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 32–3.
- 76.
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 269–70.
- 77.
Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet, 33; Hennessey, Yeats, Shakespeare, and the Irish Cultural Nationalism, 41; Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 274.
- 78.
George Saintsbury (?), Unsigned review of Ideas of Good and Evil, in The Critical Heritage, ed. A. Norman Jeffares . Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977, 135.
- 79.
Ibid., 136–8.
- 80.
Anonymous, ‘Review of Ideas of Good and Evil’, The Irish Times (22 May 1903), 7.
- 81.
Review reprinted in John Eglinton , Anglo-Irish Essays (London: Talbot Press, 1917), 46.
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Pietrzak, W. (2017). ‘Divine Essences’ in an Earthly Language: Ideas of Good and Evil . In: The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60089-5_3
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