Abstract
The challenge of Yeats’s work to subsequent writers in Ireland was, for obvious reasons, more immediate than that felt elsewhere. If, as Harold Bloom has characteristically maintained, the ‘strength’ of a poem is dependent upon its repression of anterior work which is ‘almost present in it, or nearest to presence in it’, then within his native culture that repression takes on a particular, potentially disturbing inflection.1 His own ambition to found a nationally distinctive cultural tradition (‘Enfin Yeats vint’ as John Montague has put it)2 raises urgent issues of appropriation or rejection.
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Notes
W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondance 1901–1937, edited by Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), p. 114.
Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice (London: Faber, 1995), pp. 253, 294.
In his 1940 review, MacNeice saw The Irish ‘Troubles’ of 1916–22 as focusing the dialectical qualities of Yeats’s thought in which ‘he began to conceive of life as a developing whole, a whole which depends upon the conflict of the parts’. (Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, edited by Alan Heuser, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, p. 118).
Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, edited by E.S. Burt, Kevin Newmark and Andrej Warminski, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, p. 129.
Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, Blindness & Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983 2nd edn) pp. 207–9.
Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, edited by Gregory A. Schirmer (Gerrard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), pp. 18, 16. In dismissing MacNeice’s The Poetry of W.B. Yeats in The Dublin Magazine, Clarke claimed that MacNeice’s study shows little acquaintance with Irish letters as a whole, and as a result seeks to identify the nature of Yeats’s work by discussing both the influence upon it of English Romanticism and also its associations with modernism. An ‘arbitrary and tiresome exercise’, Clarke concludes, since Yeats remained ‘strategically on the edge of tradition in the ‘nineties as well as in the ‘thirties’. Here as elsewhere, Clarke seems to be anxious to recover as valuable the very Celtic Twilight writing which MacNeice had tended to overlook as an aestheticism only tenuously related to Irish ‘reality’ (ibid., pp. 10–12). More recent Anglo-Irish poets have dramatized the difficulty of defining a relation to Ireland in more uncertain terms than those of Yeats. In ‘Cloncha’, James Simmons lists the various ‘adorations’ of the ‘Anglo-Irish boy’ within the country, before seeing the growth towards adulthood as further destabilizing that relation: ‘Today he searched for anecdotes / to establish his rights there …’. As a result he remains ‘a stranger / in the present moment / happily’. (Poems 1956–1986, p. 158–9). Richard Murphy’s sequence The Price of Stone, centring each sonnet as it does on a different habitation, suggests the uprootedness of his culture with the failure of the Big House tradition in the country. These two poets have been discussed in this light by Terence Brown in his essay ‘Poets and Patrimony: Richard Murphy and James Simmons’ in Ireland’s Literature: Selected Essays (Mullingar: The Lilliput Press, 1988).
Collected Poems, edited by Liam Miller (Dublin: Dolmen Press/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 207, 249.
The Complete Poems of Patrick Kavanagh, with commentary by Peter Kavanagh (New York: Kavanagh Head Press, 1996), p. 366.
See Chapter 3 of Marjorie Howes’s Yeats’s Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for a full discussion of Yeats’s attitudes in this area.
In a review of 1897, ‘The Tribes of Danu’, Yeats wrote ‘The Poet is happy, as Homer was happy, who can see from his door mountains …. If the poet cannot find immortal and mysterious things in his own country, he must write of far-off countries …’ (Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats, Volume II, collected and edited by John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, London: Macmillan, 1975, p. 55).
Quoted by Alex Davis, ‘“Poetry is Ontology”: Brian Coffey’s Poetics’, Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s, edited by Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), p. 157.
The Poems of Matthew Arnold, edited by Kenneth Allott (London: Longman, 1965), p. 242.
The Rhetoric of Romanticism, p. 143; Letters of W.B. Yeats, edited by Allen Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 607.
See, for example, the discussion of his work in Dillon Johnston’s Irish Poetry After Joyce (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985).
See, for example, Seamus Deane’s ‘Heroic Styles: the tradition of an idea’, and Richard Kearney’s ‘Myth and Motherland’, in Ireland’s Field Day, Field Day Theatre Company (London: Hutchinson, 1985).
See William A. Wilson, ‘Yeats, Muldoon, and Heroic History’, Learning their Trade: Essays on W.B. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Deborah Fleming (West Cornwall, Connecticut: Locust Hill Press, 1993), p. 30.
O’Donoghue has noted that ‘disconcerting uses of tenses’ are frequent in Irish poetry also (op. cit., p. 412). Yeats figures alongside Robert Frost as an example of the complex interplay between poetry and history in Muldoon’s ‘Getting Around: Notes Towards an Ars Poetica’, Essays in Criticism, Vol. XLVIII No. 2, April 1998, pp. 107–28.
Clair Wills, in Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1998), pp. 207–8, discusses this obsessive rhyming in recent Muldoon.
Variorun Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1977 edition), p. 778.
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© 2000 Steven Matthews
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MacNeice, L. et al. (2000). ‘The Terror of his Vision’: Yeats and Irish Poetry. In: Yeats as Precursor. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230599482_2
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