Abstract
This chapter reads Yeats through his desire to buy property “back home”, what is also a widely held desire among the present generation of Irish migrants and expats. Yeats writes of his desire to find a secluded home in nature back in Ireland as early as his poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” written when he was an expat in London at the age of 24. This interest in buying property back home develops into his later obsession with his “Tower” at Ballylee, a property he later bought from Lady Gregory. In the end, Yeats could only spend eight summers at Ballylee as the environment and the house itself proved too damp. This chapter therefore examines how this interest in buying property “back home” evolved in Yeats’s poetry and how it relates to his understanding of his own Anglo-Irish identity.
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- 1.
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- 2.
Carried away: the invention of modern shopping. London: Faber & Faber, 2000, pp. 20–1.
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Peter Martin, Unionism: The Irish Nobility and the Revolution 1919–23 in The Irish Revolution, Joost Augustein (ed), Palgrave (2002) p. 157.
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Howes, Marjorie Elizabeth. Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness. Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 103.
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Memoirs: Autobiography – First Draft: Journal, transcribed and edited by Denis Donoghue, London: Macmillan, 1972, p. 178.
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See Barry Crosbie, Irish Imperial Networks.
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“The aristocracy of objects: shops, heirlooms and circulation narratives in Waugh, Fitzgerald and Lovecraft”, Neohelicon (2015) 42:85–104, p. 88.
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Cullingford, Yeats, p. 72. Yeats’s tendency to align poets with the aristocracy is most clearly evident in his Memoirs: “[e]very day I notice some new analogy between [the] long-established life of the well-born and the artist’s life. We come from the permanent things and create them, and instead of old blood we have old emotions and we carry in our head that form of society which aristocracies create now and again for some brief moment at Urbino or Versailles”. In James Pethica, Yeats’ Poetry, Drama and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Contexts, Criticism. (London, 2000), p. 251.
- 13.
Yeats bought the castle at Thoor Ballylee, previously known as Ballylee Castle, near Gort in Co. Galway in 1917. He spent the next two years restoring it as a family home.
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O’Sullivan, M. (2018). Yeats: The Expat Buys Property ‘Back Home’. In: Irish Expatriatism, Language and Literature. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95900-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95900-9_5
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