Already a minor poet of some standing on the London literary scene in autumn 1892, W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) returned to Ireland in autumn 1892 to found the National Literary Society in Dublin with others of the same mind - a momentous event for modern Irish culture that ultimately lent wings to the parallel movement towards political separation which had as its most dramatic outcome in the formation of a separate Irish state in the geographically-larger portion of the island in 1921, amid differences of opinion, North and South, which are no part of this module to consider.

Although a believer in Home Rule at the time and briefly a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in the years that were to follow, W. B. Yeats did not count independent Irish statehood part of his intention when he decided to advance a newly dignified sense for the term ‘Irish literature’ - or what, for many decades, we used to call ‘Anglo-Irish Literature’ and now call ‘Irish Literature in English’, and sometimes even ‘Irish writing’. In his Autobiographies (1926; enlarged 1955) he professed the belief that Irish nationalists began to turn away from politics to culture with the death of Parnell in 1891; and, though he wrote ardently nationalist sentences in support of the Revival, he later revealed a deeply ambivalent attitude to the separatist movement when he wrote, ‘I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons’. (“General Introduction to My Works”, in 1935.)

Prominent among the ‘passing reasons’ which he leaves unmentioned was the necessity of carrying nationalist Ireland with him if his literary movement was to succeed. Another reason was his love for Maud Gonne (1865-1953), the exceptionally beautiful daughter of the Anglo-Irish landlord class who - that is, Maud - became a radical republican through her experience of conditions among the landless peasantry of Ireland. Yeats recorded his feelings about her in innumerable love-poems as well as in his Memoirs where he recollects their first meeting: ‘I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began.’ His involvement in Irish nationalist was, at least in part, motivated by a desire to impress her. Aside from that, however, he was inspired by an idea that was more essentially a cultural than a political one. At about the date when the National Literary Society was established it became a tenet with him that ‘[t]here is no great literature without great nationality, and no great nationality without great literature’ - as he wrote in the Boston Pilot for 23 April, 1892 (for many years, Yeats lived largely by reviews of Irish books in British and American journals).

The chief trouble with this idea is that it addressed a state of affairs which had no real existence. Properly speaking there was no such thing as ‘Irish literature’ at the time, and hence it was more of an aspiration than an assertion - and one which, incidentally, more obviously held true of England, France and Germany than contemporary Ireland. Indeed, in so far as there existed such a thing as ‘Irish literature’ at all, that entity could only be the literature written in Irish (that is, the Gaelic language), chiefly surviving in manuscripts from remote historical times before the ruin of Gaelic society and culture by the English power in Ireland. This, indeed, became a subject of warm contention between Yeats and those such as Douglas Hyde who sought to revive the Irish language as the primary medium for social life in Ireland. [See Introductory Lecture, supra.]

In an autobiographical context, Yeats’s striving after Irish national literature was something of a fiction also. He was Irish an Irishman by birth in the sense of having been ‘born here’ - as Leopold Bloom would later tell the irate nationalist in Joyce’s novel Ulysses. More specifically he was Anglo-Irish; and, more specifically still, he was an Irish middle-class Protestant descended from generations of Church of Ireland rectors on his father’s side and sea-going merchants on his mother’s. His father had studied to be a lawyer but had abandoned that profession for a chronically unprofitable career as a portrait-painter which took him to London in 1867, where Yeats was for the most part raised. Trips to Dublin and summers in Sligo provided the materials with which the poet would later reinvent himself as an Irishman in exile; but even at the height of the Literary Revival he never lived for more than half the year in Ireland.

A sense of being separated from a native place was nevertheless acutely felt if only because the Yeats family was different from the rest of their acquaintance in London - a city that regarded itself as the centre of an empire on which the sun proverbially ‘never sets’ (in the words of Rudyard Kipling - whom Joyce was later to describe as ‘a French Celt’ ... just for divilment!) In comparison with his schoolboy peers at Hammersmith Grammar School, for instance, Yeats was conscious that he was cut off from ‘those memories of Limerick and the Yellow Ford that would have strengthened an Irish Catholic’ while they had ‘Agincourt and Crécy and the Union Jack and were all very patriotic’ (Autobiographies, 1955). He was, in that sense, one of the dispossessed.

There was another kind of dispossession to contend with. In the early pages of his Autobiographies he wrote of his sufferings as a boy of religious temperament who had been ‘deprived’ of spiritual sustenance by the materialist outlook of his father, a disciple of great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill. In early manhood, W. B. Yeats deviated extremely from the parental path by joining the Theosophical Society in London and later by founding a branch of the same in Dublin with George (‘‘AE’’) Russell while studying at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. (“AE” believed he had actually seen fairies and demi-gods in the hills of Co. Armagh, where he was born.)

All of this put Yeats in touch with folklore, magic, the Kabbala, the Zodiac and the Anima Mundi, ideas which would furnish material for his poetry and his theories about poetry in the future, culminating finally with a philosophical tract based on his wife’s experience of ‘automatic writing’ which he called A Vision (1925). Far from regarding magic and religion in isolation from literature, Yeats tended to bestow upon writers and artists precisely those powers more commonly ascribed to visionaries and mystics, as well as the more material powers associated with prophets which suggested that the poet or ‘mage’ might have a role to play in the making of human - and more particularly, racial - history as well as in the hermetic side of life.

While grafting on the then-fashionable notions of the theosophical movement in London, Yeats took his literary ideas from the English romantic tradition and for him - as for Percy Bysshe Shelley - the poets were readily seen as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. A similar idea had been even more vigorously promulgated in the mid-century when Thomas Carlyle advanced it in his famous Lectures on Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841), winning over a generations of young men to his somewhat fervid version of the literary life. Yeats himself despised the preachy, low-church tone of Carlylean writings when he met with it in the men who lapped it up such as the Irish nationalist John Mitchel but the ruling principle was operative: great writers actually invent the ideas by which we live. (This was more easily asserted then than our own media age.)

The idea of the artist invoked in this manner had less to do, in Yeats’s thinking, with any question of political involvement as with a belief that poets engendered the ‘images’ by which a human community lives as what we now call an ‘imagined community’ - to used the frequently-echoed term that Benedict Anderson coined to describe the way in which a group of individuals comes to regard themselves as a ‘people’ or a ‘nation’ linked by spatial and temporal affinities to others, alive or dead, connected by history and language with the same territory or ‘land’. Yeats might have attached this idea directly to Ireland considered as the territory of the Gaelic Irish people; or even the composite Gaelic-Norman-Cromwellian people whom Thomas Davis and other “Young Irelanders” of the 1840s had identified as ‘the nation’. Instead, the model that he adopted was medieval European society.

In this he shared in an intellectual fad beginning to be established on the English-language scene according to which social culture had deviated from the proper model with the advent of modern society as represented by - for instance - the industrial revolution. What was now missing, according to this theory, was the social cohesion which had formerly been instilled in the medieval world by poets, and which Yeats referred to as ‘unity of image’: 'Had not Europe shared one mind and heart, until both mind and heart began to break into fragments a little before Shakespeare's birth?’ - as he wrote in his Autobiographies.T. S. Eliot was another who had things to say about ‘disociation of sensibility’ and what purportedly went wrong that the close of the medieval period - an odd idea which can readily be seen as springing from the disappointment of an educated élite with little or no apparent role to play in a modern world that seemed to them to belong to shopkeepers and journalists rather than their own intellectually exalted class.

Yet the historical justification of the theory that Chaucer or Shakespeare represent a break-water between organic society and its opposite was of no real importance to Yeats as a matter of debate. What was important to him was that the manner in which ‘unity of being’ and ‘unity of image’ (terms he used interchangeably) offered a counterpoint to the contemporary conditions that he saw in Englandand, to a lesser extent in Ireland. Indeed, backward Ireland - in spite of the advanced made by Victorian modernity since the development of a railway system in the 1850s - came to serve Yeats as a polar opposite to atomised society of industrial Britain, an affair of shoddy manufactures, scabrous journalism and rampant democracy - all adding up to what he calls ‘grey Truth’ in an early poem (“The Happy Shepherd”) and ‘the filthy modern tide’ in a much later one (“The Municipal Gallery Revisited”).

The resultant attitude was a mixture of conservatism - lamenting the demise of an older order - and millenianism - looking forward to a collapse of the present system. It is not hard to see that such a mixture might lead to a great deal of trouble when the Fascist period dawned in modern Europe and in the 1930s he did indeed align himself with the notorious Brown Shirts who promised to bring a kind of revived medievalism to European society under the form of militaristic and quasi-mystical ideas about race and nation. But all of that lay long in the future in the 1890s when Yeats contemplated the idea of Irish national culture.

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Before engaging with the specific versions of Irish nationality that Yeats espoused at the level of literary production in place of his earliest attempts to write a poetry that reflected the Indian preoccupations of the Theosophical Society, it is worth considering to what extent his advocacy of Irish literature and Irish nationhood in 1892 was a necessity of his personal life - something driven and impelled within his sensibility as it might have been in the sensibility of one of the Irish Catholics ‘strengthened’ by ‘memories of Limerick and the Yellow Ford’ of which wrote, as we have seen earlier. (Limerick here stands, of course, for the defeat of the Catholic cause in 1690 and the establishment of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland.)

According to John Frayne, the editor of his political writings (Uncollected Prose, 1972), the early Yeats is best understood as a London-based poet who, in about 1886, began to see that he could carve out a market niche for himself by offering a specialist version of English romantic literature under the form of Irish myth - material now becoming available through the translations of the great translator John O’Donovan and other Irish-language scholars whose work was being published in a trickle by the Irish Text Society at about that time. Frayne has written:

This is not, of course, the obligatory view of Yeats’s conversion to Irish material and his espousal of the dream of a distinctive form of modern Irish literature and much of what he wrote in his Autobiographies suggests that he did, in fact, discover an intense sense of lack in himself where the idea of a national culture and a national community of minds might be have been found either in a contemporary English or an contemporary Irish school-boy. It was perhaps only colonial hybrids like Yeats himself who were deficient in the necessary self-assurance - though, in fact, the Irish school-boy was likely to accept a subaltern position in the predominantly ‘English’ world, especially when it came to making his way along the official channels of power and prestige that made up the working life of empire, as so many successfully did.

What Frayne’s remarks reveal is that, in espousing Irish material and setting out establishing an Irish literary movement for its propagation, W. B. Yeats was striking out for a new territory within English literature no less than he was asserting the autonomy of Irish writing. It is this which give particular poignancy to his answer to Douglas Hyde’s increasingly confident assertion of the possibility of reviving the Irish language as the dominant medium of literary culture in Ireland. (Hyde and others founded the Gaelic League in 1893 and with that set in place a form of cultural nationalism which almost inevitably led to the formation of a separate Irish-Ireland state in 1921.) [For the exchange between Hyde and Yeats, see the Introductory Lecture, infra.]

In W. B. Yeats, then, three ideas came forcefully together: the resuscitation of English romanticism by reviving ancient Irish legends as material for poetry; the assertion of Irish dignity against the increasingly dominant forms of Anglo-American popular culture, and the creation of a space in modern literature where ideas of religious spirituality and magic which had been effectively banished from the Anglo-Saxon world could be reintroduced through the Celtic back-door. In order to combine these, he had to construct an imaginative (and imaginary) history Ireland that repositioned the class from which he sprung - the Anglo-Irish - as an amalgam of what was best in both traditions while remaining free from the infections of vulgarity or modernity to be found in each. In the ensuing lectures, I will examine the impact of this deeply fictionalised conception of society and self in relation to the early and middle poetry.

Bruce Stewart