Abstract
The title of New Poems, published when Yeats was seventy-three, was no doubt calculated to remind critics who might have been inclined to assume that he had already written his last poems, that he was not only capable of producing another very substantial and significant volume of verse, but that he also considered he was not merely repeating himself, and had something new to say. Last Poems is of course a posthumous title, given to Yeats’s last volume by his wife and editors; but he had planned the collection, thought of it as another book for publication, and even as he kept writing and adding new poems to the collection, was concerned that they be published in the sequence he had decided on. It is his conscious final poetic statement, not the consequence of an unforeseen termination of his life and career. Indeed, the list of contents he provided was very likely his last conscious act.1 That so many of the poems were composed by Yeats when he was aware of his own impending death lends Last Poems a decided poignancy; the two volumes are sufficiently of the same period and character, however, to permit their being discussed here without making sharp distinctions between them. They overlap in various ways, and their titles can mislead: “Just as Last Poems includes a good many written prior to the last, so New Poems is not simply the newest.”2
It would be a mistake to consider fascism as inherently alien to Irish susceptibilities.
—Brian Girvin, A New History of Ireland VII
I am terrified by the thought of the sort of people who may one day invoke my authority.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to his sister, June 1884
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Notes
Last Poems: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats, ed. James Pethica (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), xxvi.
New Poems: Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats, ed. J. C. C. Mays and Stephen Parrish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), xxix.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 242.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 338.
W. B. Yeats, “Per Amica Silentia Lunae”(1917) reprinted in Collected Works of W.B.Yeats, Vol. V: Later Essays ed. William H. O’Donnell (New York: Scribner, 1994), 8.
John Carey, Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 3–22. Carey points out that the leftist Frankfurt group, with the exception of Benjamin, shared the conservative modernists’ opinion of mass culture (43).
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 298.
W. B. Yeats, On the Boiler (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1938), 19.
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 295.
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Vol. III Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), 73.
W. B. Yeats, “The Wicked Hawthorn Tree” in Broadsides. A Collection of Old and New Songs 1935 (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1935).
Marjorie Howes, Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class, and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 185.
See R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life II The Arch-Poet 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): “the label of para-fascism seems most appropriate” (472). Mike Cronin “The Blueshirt Movement, 1932–5: Ireland’s Fascists?” in the Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30 (1995), says “The Blueshirts clearly deser ve the label of potential para-fascists” (330). Fearghal McGarry, “General O’Duffy, the National Corporate Party and the Irish Brigade” in Ireland in the 1930s: New Perspectives, ed. Joost Augusteijn (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), describes the Blueshirts as “semi-fascist” (117). Cronin lists Yeats, Alfred O’Rahilly, Desmond Fitzgerald, Francis Stuart, Walter Starkie, T. F. O’Higgins, Ernest Blythe, and others as belonging to this grouping of artists and intellectuals who supported the Blueshirts (313–14).
The phrase is attributed to Yeats in an essay on Yeats and Nietzsche by Erich Heller, in his The Importance of Nietzsche: Ten Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 131.
Brian Girvin, “The Republicanization of Irish Society, 1932–48” in A New History of Ireland VII Ireland, 1921–84, ed. J. R. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 141.
Michael Farrell, Emergency Legislation: The Apparatus of Repression (Derry: Field Day, 1986), 10.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 34.
W. J. Maloney’s The Forged Casement Diaries was published in Dublin, by Talbot Press, in 1936.
Yeats’s letter to Sir William Rothenstein of December, 1938, refers to the statue of Cuchulain as “bad.” Cited in Scattering Branches: Tributes to the Memory of W. B. Yeats, ed. Stephen Gwynn (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 53. Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 271–72.
Aidan Clarke, “The Colonisation of Ulster and the rebellion of 1641 (1603–60)” in The Course of Irish History, ed. T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin (Cork: Mercier Press, 1967), 189.
A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 383.
Letter to Dorothy Wellesley, January 8, 1937 in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, introduction by Kathleen Raine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), 131.
David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 69.
The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, ed. W. B. Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), xi.
Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” in Selected Writings Volume 4 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 48, 8.
Maud Gonne, “Yeats and Ireland” in Scattering Branches: Tributes to W. B. Yeats, ed. Stephen Gwynn (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 27.
Stephen Gwynn, Irish Literature and Drama in the English Language: A Short History (London: Nelson, 1936), 158–59.
Seamus Heaney, “Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin” in The Redress of Poetry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 162.
W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight introduction Kathleen Raine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1981), 128.
Cited in Yeats: Last Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Macmillan, 1968), 199.
Letter from Yeats to Maud Gonne, June 16, 1938, in The Gonne–Yeats Letters 1893–1938, ed. Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 451.
Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 92.
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© 2011 Anthony Bradley
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Bradley, A. (2011). Modernism, Fascism, and Irish Nationalism: New Poems (1938), Last Poems (1939) . 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_6
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