ENG105 - Lecture 2: W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore

Irish folklore was one of the earliest enthusiasms of W. B. Yeats and a constant source of inspiration for his poetry, early and late. For him it represented both a distinctive body of imaginative materials and a glimpse of spiritual realities which the modern world had effectively foreclosed (or at least denied).   The legends and superstitions which he and Lady Gregory recorded through their researchs in nineteenth-century collections but also in the course of personal research in the cottages of her tenants in Co. Galway (where she had a family estate) provided Yeats with inspiration and material for his art but also with a body of lore about the fairies of sidhe of Ireland which he chose to take at face-value and purported to believe in, somewhat as an alternative to either orthodox religious belief or atheism (which he abhorred).  All of this meant that in Yeats's regarded Irish folklore not merely as an entertaining body of popular materials but as a key to the imaginative life of mankind and even a obscure key to the nature of eternal things. At the same time, he regarded Irish folklore as a living testament to the power of the imagination - even, indeed, the role of the imagation in creating the world. In this he seemed to share a doctrine with the ancient Irish druids of whom he wrote (in his preface to Lady Gregory's Gods and Fighting Men (1904): “One remembers the Druid who answered, when some one asked him who made the world, ‘The Druids made it.'"  This was another way of saying what he said in his last poem, “Under Ben Bulben”

Life and death was not, Till man made up the whole, Lock, stock and barrel, Out of his bitter soul [...]

But more of that in another lecture and another module. In this lecture we discussed:-

1. The beginning of the Irish literary revival when at a meeting of the National Literary Society in Nov. 1892, called by W. B. Yeats when he returned from London (see Chronology); 2. The importance of folklore in his conception of the new literature that he proposed to create and encourage in Ireland; 3. The close collaboration between W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory in collecting stories from the Irish peasants and in publishing Irish folklore, as well as reprinting Irish fairy tales of earlier periods; 4. Yeats's belief in the special interest of Irish folklore, not simply as a scientific record of what superstituous people living at a distance from the developed cities (or metropolis) believed but as an expression of the human imagination at its full power; 5. And also as a key to the spiritual significance of life and literature, in which he invested all his energy through folklore studies, mysticism, and his membership of hermetic societies such as the “Golden Dawn”. 6. We also looked at the literary quality of Yeats's transcription of Irish superstitions with particular reference to the belief in the iarlais or “changeling” - that is, the substituted child 7. In so doing, we compared his short prose narrative “Away” with the highly-celebrated early poem “The Stolen Child”. [In so doing, we saw how the rather ambigous tone of the former - oscillating between that of a sceptical observer and a convinced, though gentlemanly, believer in peasant folklore - contrasts with the achieve tone of suspended belief in the poem, where the loss and gain of the child in entering the fairies' realm involves the sacrifice of those things which make the “suffering” life of humanity in a world “too full of tears for you to understand” ultimately worthwhile.] 8. We also considered Yeats wider estimate of the value of Irish folklore and legend, but particularly the myths which Lady Gregory had translated in Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904). His prefaces to these are worth examining, considered as a synopsis of his views on ancient Irish literature. 9. Finally, we discussed the language of the Irish literary revival - given that the original myths and legends which Yeats and Lady Gregory sought to “revive” were conceived and ultimately recorded in the Irish language. To this question Yeats has a considered answer: ‘Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish for in spirit for being English in Language?’ [See more.] In the second lecture of the week, some attention was given to the question of translation, largely as covered in Lecture 1 on this website. Marie Heaney's account of her methods of compilation were closely compared with those of Lady Gregory, while the question of the requirements of their different audiences and those of ourselves today were also opened to interrogation. In general, the lecture endorses the idea - often repeated by Yeats - that Irish legend and folklore constitutes the “treasure” of the Irish people, and that it has served as a building block of the modern literature of Ireland. At the same time, the literature that was produced by the Irish literary revival was not, in essence, a revivalist literature so much as a modern literature that laid claims to unique and authentic foundations in an era before the arrival of the English and their culture, and, even, indeed, before the advent of Christianity in Ireland. Modern Irish literature is both “Irish” and “modern” - a point to be brought out in connection with the new tradition inaugurated by the realist writers George Moore and James Joyce in other lectures of this module.

ENG105C1A: University of Ulster