Abstract
William Butler Yeats was not just Irish by virtue of his birth and upbringing—he helped define and imagine a particular kind of Irishness that shaped the modern nation of Ireland. Yeats not only imagined Ireland in his poems and plays, but anticipated modern theories of nationalism, often using similar language to describe the creative power of the aesthetic image in imagining the community of the nation, emphasizing the ways Irish nationalism could be a substitute religious belief that might unify divisive sectarian and class loyalties, and pointing up the importance of the psychology of love and death in nationalism. Yeats’s creative powers and the Irish nation were symbiotically linked in the minds of many, and certainly in his own mind. Yeats was a public figure in Ireland long before he was appointed senator in the first Irish government (1922), and when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, it seemed to many (even, with due allowance made for modesty, to Yeats) that the prize was to some extent a recognition of the new Irish Free State: “Of course I know quite well that this honour is not given to me as an individual but as a representative of a literary movement and a nation and I am glad to have it so.”1
They [the great writers] were national first … and it was the intensity of their own nationalism which made them international.
—James Joyce, in conversation with Arthur Power
Without Yeats there would have been no Literary Revival in Ireland. Without the inspiration of that Revival and the glorification of beauty and heroic virtue I doubt there would have been an Easter Week.
—Maud Gonne, “Yeats and Ireland”
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Notes
W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 701.
W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 837.
Lyn Innes, “Orientalism and Celticism” in Irish and Postcolonial Writing: History, Theory, Practice, ed. Glenn Hooper and Colin Graham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 153.
Cited in John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 102.
D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (London: Routledge, 1991), 133.
Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith Elder, 1867).
Douglas Hyde, “On the Necessity for de-Anglicizing Ireland” 1892, reprinted in Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, ed. David Pierce (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000), 2–13.
W. B. Yeats, Letters to the New Island , ed. Horace Reynolds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). See, for example, 153–54.
A. Norman Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography (London: Arena, 1990), 26.
James Blake “Yeats, Oisin and Irish Gaelic Literature” in Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature: Aspects of Language and Culture, Volume 1, ed. Birgit Bramsback and Martin Croghan (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1988), 40.
The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. III Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), 167.
R. F. Foster, William Butler Yeats: A Life I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 112.
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism Revised Edition (London: Verso, 1991) is by now the classic formulation of the idea that nations are cultural creations or inventions, rather than the inevitable result of a natural political evolution.
David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 59.
Only 500 copies of The Wanderings of Oisin were sold and 750 of The Wind Among the Reeds, but the 1895 collection Poems sold steadily, and better than any other volume, according to Yeats. See George Bornstein, Introduction, The Early Poetry Volume II Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats: “The Wanderings of Oisin” and Other Early Poems to 1895 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
It is a little misleading to refer to Yeats’s “early poetry,” since he revised his work so frequently and over such a long period of time that it is uncertain which version of a poem, if any, should be the definitive text. Most collections of Yeats’s verse print the last in the series of revisions, but this means that a poem in an early volume might have been strongly revised over a period of twenty years or more, and may be the product of Yeats’s middle (or even old) age rather than his youth. “The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland,” for example, first published in 1891, was revised for the last time in 1933. See George Bornstein, “What is the Text of a Poem by Yeats?” in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 167–93. Yeats’s equation of Ireland with the western province of Connacht can be found in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Vol. VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary Fitzgerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), 115.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 205.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964), 181.
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) 168, 159;
James Joyce, “The Day of the Rabblement” in Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1964), 71.
James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), 9.
G. J. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 88–89.
The King’s Threshold: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats, ed. Declan Kiely (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 1.
Charles Townshend, Ireland in the 20th Century (London: Arnold, 1999), 94.
Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 199–244.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 1978), 241.
Letter to Frank Fay, cited in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Vol. II: The Plays, ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001), 849.
David Pierce, in his Yeats’s Worlds: Ireland, England, and the Poetic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995) writes, “It was a tradition in Connemara for boys up to the age of twelve to be dressed as girls, for it was thought that girls would not be taken by the fairies,” and reproduces a photograph of three boys dressed in skirts (39).
The personae “Aedh,” “Hanrahan,” and “Robartes” were intended to represent different aspects of the lover, but were abandoned after the first edition: see The Wind Among the Reeds: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats, ed. Carolyn Holdsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), xxvii. Robartes reappears in Yeats’s later poetry, however.
W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 247.
See, for example, Helen Vendler, “Technique in the Earlier Poems of Yeats” in Yeats Annual No. 8, ed. Warwick Gould (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 3–20; Richard Taylor, “Metrical Variation in Yeats’s Verse” (same volume) 21–38;
Thomas Parkinson, W. B. Yeats Self-Critic: A Study of His Early Verse and the Later Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (New York: Cambridge, 1991) 26. North suggests a connection between Yeats and Benjamin in his title linking politics and aesthetics, but he does not develop the connection; his sense of Yeats’s nationalism (and indeed Irish nationalism as a whole) is founded on what he sees as an irresolvable contradiction in nationalism between the individual and the community. But I see Yeats’s longed-for solitude in Sligo as, like Thoreau’s in Walden, a pastoral retreat, and not inconsistent with their lifetimes of political activism and involvement. North’s sense of Irish nationalism comes close to endorsing the colonialist stereotype of the Irish as essentially violent, since he argues that Yeats’s poetry discloses “what the Civil War and the Troubles also proved, that the Irish do not hold in common any ideals, beliefs or practices, but only the violence caused by the lack of these” (61).
Mary Kinzie, A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 290.
Thomas MacDonagh, Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish, first published 1916, reprinted by Kennikat Press, Port Washington, New York, 1970, 72.
A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), 12.
W. B . Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (originally published 1893, 1902), reprinted with introduction by Kathleen Raine (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1981), 153.
W. B. Yeats: Short Fiction, ed. G. J. Watson (London: Penguin, 1995), xxix.
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© 2011 Anthony Bradley
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Bradley, A. (2011). “Romantic Ireland”: The Early Poems and Plays (1885–1910). In: Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119543_2
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