W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore

The only two powers that trouble the deeps are religion and love, the others make a little trouble on the surface.’ (Quoted in Louis MacNeice, W. B. Yeats, London: Faber & Faber 1941.)

‘O my dear, I have no solution, none.’ ( Letters on the Poetry of W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, OUP 1940 [rep. 1964], p.196; quoted in Richard Ellmann, The Man and the Masks, 1948, p.295.)


The main business of this week’s lecture-room discourse was to describe the role of folklore in the Irish literary revival, and specifically the importance attached to it by W. B. Yeats, illustrating the matter with some examples of the use he made of folklore in his imaginative writings.
  Textual resources looked at here included quotations of his views on folklore, his prefaces to Lady Gregory’s legends of Cuchulain and the “gods and fighting men” of ancient Ireland, and extracts from his discussion of the rights and wrongs of founding a “revivalist” Irish literature in the English language.


OHPs (in class)
W. B. Yeats and the Language Issue Some Examples of Folklore in Yeats’s poems
“The Changeling” (prose) “The Stolen Child” (poem)

Further Materials
Chronology of Yeats’s Folklore activity Yeats on Irish Folkore (various remarks).
Yeats on the Irish Literary Revival Prefaces to Lady Gregory’s Collections


Lecture

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