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Yeats on the the Literary Revival and the Irish Language
| Yeats’s confession of interest in literary imagination as an alternative to religion (Autobiographies, 1955) |
| ‘I was unlike others of my generation in one thing only. I am very religious, and deprived by Huxley and Tyndall, whom I detested, of the simple-minded religion of my childhood, I had made a new religion, an almost infallible church, of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories, and of personages, and of emotions, inseparable from their first expression, passed on from generation to generation by poets and painters with some help form philosophers and theologians. I wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually, and not in pictures and poems only, but in tiles around the chimney-piece and in the hangings that kept out the draught.’ (Autobiographies, 1955, pp.115-16; quoted [inter alia] in Terence Brown, A Critical Life of W. B. Yeats, Gill & Macmillan 1999, p.31.) |
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| “A Postscript to a Forthcoming Work of Essays by Various Writers”, in Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, ed., John P. Frayne & C. Johnson (London: Macmillan 1975), Vol. II, p.245. |
‘I think that our Irish movements [i.e., the literary and language revivals] have always interested me in part, because I see in them the quarrel of two traditions of life, one old and noble, one new and ignoble. one undying because it satisfies our conscience though it seemed dying and one about to die because it is hateful to our conscience, although it seems triumphant throughout the world. In Ireland wherever the Gaelic tongue is still spoken, and to some little extent where it is not, the people live according to a tradition of life that existed before the world surrendered to the competition of merchants and to the vulgarity that has been founded on it; and we who would keep the Gaelic tongue and Gaelic memories and Gaelic habits of our mind would keep them, as I think, that we may some day spread a tradition of life that would build up neither great wealth nor great poverty, that makes the arts a natural expression of life that permits even common men to understand good art and high thinking and to have the fine manners these things can give.’ (Quoted in Emer Nolan, ‘Modernism and the Irish Revival’, in Joe Cleary & Claire Connolly, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Irish Literature, Cambridge UP 2005, p.158.)
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| [Note that Nolan adds: ‘Yeats’s conception of fin-de-siècle Ireland as the site of a collision between ancient tradition and commercial civilisation is central to his work. It need hardly be stated [...] that his analysis falls short of the complexity of his historical situation, and that modern Ireland did not effectively resist, much less overturn, industrialism or capitalism.’ (Idem.)] |
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| [“National Tradition”]: A letter to United Ireland, (17 Dec. 1892). |
‘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? Can we not keep the continuity of the nation’s life not be doing what Dr. Hyde has practically pronounced impossible [i.e., reviving the Irish language] but by translating or re-telling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm and style, all that is best of the ancient literature.’ (Rep. in John P. Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, Vol. I, 1970, p.57.) |
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| [“Irish Language”] Autobiographies (London: Macmillan 1955). |
| ‘Again and again I am asked why I do not write in Gaelic. [...] I begged the Indian writers present to remember that no man can think or write with music and vigour except in his mother tongue. I turned a friendly audience hostile, yet when I think of that scene I am unrepentent and angry. / I could no more have written in Gaelic than can those Indians write in English; Gaelic is my national language, but it is not my mother tongue.’ (p.520). Note also: ‘I might have found more of Ireland if I had written in Irish, but I have found a little, and I have found all myself.’ [q.p.; see further in OHPs, infra.] |
ENG105C1A: University of Ulster
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