In 1902 W. B. Yeats told his readers in Samhain - established as an organ of the Irish Literary Theatre - that ‘our movement is a return to the people’, basing this assertion on the belief that ‘if you would ennoble a man of the roads you must write about the man of the roads, or about the people of romance, or about great historical people.’ This was a populist idea admitting many variations, yet a central feature of Yeats’s career was to be the vacillation that informs his relation with the masses considered as source of, and audience for, the literature of the Revival.

In the same year he struck a more pugnacious note: ‘In a battle like Ireland’s, which is one of poverty against wealth, we must prove our sincerity by making ourselves unpopular to wealth. We must accept the baptism of the gutter’ (Dramatis Personae, 1902) [1]. Yet, many years later, in 1923, when the Irish Free State had come into being as a result of just such a convictions on the part of nationalists in arms, he registered a definite change of mind:

Suddenly, the ‘educated classes’ not the ‘mass of the people’ were those on whom he wished to work since the masses have proved to be a deficient in the capacity to ground a national culture of the kind that he had dreamt of. In historical reality the Irish masses had created a petty-bourgeois, pietistic Catholic state in their own image - prim and grim, as Seamus Deane has said - and Yeats wanted no part of it. Instead he slipped increasingly into an élitist frame of mind which bordered dangerously on fascism - that political fantasy of an organic form of nationhood free from capitalist exploitation and based in racial unity which brought tragedy to mid-twentieth century Europe.

In retrospect the formation of a separate Irish state in 1921 was barely conceivable without the cultural impetus of the Irish Literary Revival which had made such strong claims for the Irish nation as an imagined community, bonded by shared experience and traditions. W. B. Yeats’s part in supplying the impetus for that had been central at the start. His own first steps towards the creation of a distinctively Irish literary culture had been heralded as earlier as 1886 when he had published a two-part essay in praise of Sir Samuel Ferguson, the poet-translator of Irish myth and legends.

According to Yeats, Ferguson - who married into the Guinness dynasty and was knighted for public service - ‘went back to the Irish cycle, finding it, in truth, a foundation that, in the passage of centuries [...] was forgotten of the poets’. In his Lays of the Western Gael (1865) and his other works, Ferguson had resuscitated something of the authentically Irish. He was, moreover, a good lyric poet and perhaps the first to give Irish translation proper expression in English. Yeats thought him ‘the greatest Irish poet’, not least because his ‘poems and legends [...] embody more completely than in any other man’s writings, the Irish character, its unflinching devotion to some single aim, its passion.’

To this defining formula (‘What is Irishness?’), Yeats he added a special plea for the Celtic element:

At the time when the article appeared, Yeats had already embarked on a long Irish poem of his own based on the legend of Oisín, son of Fionn Mac Cumhaill [Finn MacCool] who had been taken off to the islands of eternal youth by the beautiful fairy maiden Naimh, but who resumed his human years when his foot accidentally touched the ground in Ireland on his return long ages after.

The immediate source for Yeat’s long poem was Michael Comyn’s poem "The Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth" which he met in a translation by Brian O’Looney, and behind that lay the 12th-century Gaelic tale Acallamh na Senorach (The Colloquy of the Ancients) in which St. Patrick meets Oisín and travels around Ireland with him - thus collapsing two epochs of Irish history into one: the pagan and the Christian.

By way of plot, Yeats’s poem concentrates on magic scenes in Tír na nÓg [Land of Youth], but ends with a fiery exchange between the pagan warrior and the Christian missionary. When Patrick tells Oisín that his companions in the Fianna (or warrior-band) of ancient days cannot be admitted to the Christian heaven, the ancient hero has this to say:

Here Yeats seems to side with pagan sentiments in these lines, showing a clear preference for war-like and passionate heroes over sanctified souls in heaven. It is an understandable preference from the standpoint of cosmopolitan literature, but less so from the standpoint of Irish Catholic nationalism which with - as yet - he had attempted to make no treaty. At the same time he also introduces the highly-marked word Fenian and by doing so he engages in a complex and daring negotiation with contemporary political feelings in Ireland.

The term Fenian derives, in fact, from the word Fianna and was invented by John O’Mahony in the 1860s to describe the membership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret revolutionary society established in America with the intent of overthrowing English power in Ireland. Aside from a rebellion in Ireland, this was to be advanced by the dynamite campaign of 1967 which resulted in the Clerkenwell Explosion and the subsequent execution of the so-called ‘Manchester Martyrs’ who were involved in it and in its sequel, and abortive ‘prison escape’ that resulted in the death of a policeman.

As a somewhat incidental effect, it also caused mid-nineteenth-century English intellectuals such as Matthew Arnold to consider closely what the Irish politic passions were all about in regard to the cultural identity of the two races Saxon and Celt who made up the British nation, as he saw it. Arnold’s answer had less to do with practical issues of political justice than with the nature of the ‘Celtic spirit’ considered as an innate resistance to what Arnold called the ‘despotism of fact’ - in other words, the supposed realism of the English state and people (though actually, perhaps, their experience of and commitment to empirical methods of administration both at home and in the farther reaches of the empire).

In a lecture of 19 May 1893 entitled “Nationality and Literature”, Yeats took up Arnold’s theme and inverted it, thus establishing an anti-materialist programme for the Literary Revival:

Among the first poems in which Yeats incorporated this vision of the Ireland as the anti-materialist outlook of the ordinary Irish was “The Stolen Child” - a piece based on the peasant belief in the phenomenon of the changeling [iarlais], that is, a child substituted by the fairies for another whom they have taken to themselves, a legend that seemed to explain, e.g., the Downes Syndrome child. (pertinently, perhaps Yeats calls the child ‘the solomn-eyed one’).

In writing of the poem in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) he chose to underscore the fact that ‘the places mentioned [in it] are round Sligo’, citing in particular the Rosses as ‘a very noted fairy locality’ where ‘if anyone falls asleep, there is danger of waking silly, the fairies having carried off their souls’; and, to the extent that it mentions specific place-names, the poem is certainly anchored in the Sligo landscape. At the same time, the actual details given here are have very little to do with Lough Gill or anywhere else in Ireland. For one thing, there is no ‘rocky highland’ above Sleuth Wood; and nor do ‘water-rats’ and ‘reddest cherries’ feature among the local fauna and flora of the region.

In effect, it is a Scottish scene or else a Victorian painting of fairy-life, as in the poems of Christina Rossetti, that Yeats has put on paper - for want of a more accurate Irish image. Yet the poem has undeniable evocative power, and this has much to do with its memorable refrain: ‘For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand’ - but also with the antithesis it establishes between first stanza and last between the fairies’ promise of happiness and the actual loss that the child experiences on surrendering to their blandishments:

Yeats told his friend Katherine Tynan that the poetry he was writing at this time was part of ‘a flight into fairyland, from the real world’, and - echoing Arnold more exactly - that it aimed to expressed ‘the cry of the heart against necessity.’ (Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 1986, pp.54-55.) The epitome of that flight is surely ‘‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’’, a poem that amalgamates the mind-set of romantic transcendentalists in the pattern of Emerson and Thoreau with the accoutrements of early-medieval Ireland - the ‘island of saints and sages’ on the model of St. Kevin. In his Autobiographies (1955) Yeats wrote:

There is room for some practical criticism of Yeats’ notions of good building in regard to a cabin of an ‘clay and wattles’ erected on a rainswept island in the west of Ireland, but the central thrust of the poetic fantasy is emotional, not ecological. Clearly - on the biographical evidence (viz., ‘bodily desire and the inclination [...] towards women’), the celibate temper of the poem stems from the poet’frustration at Maud Gonne’s refusal to reciprocate his love. But beyond the personal motives, what the poem expresses is a spirited rejection of the modern world as represented by ‘the pavements grey’ of the British metropolis in favour of the unhurried clime of rural Ireland as the poet sees it.

‘The pavements grey’ is less an incidental detail but the sign of a defining cultural antithesis. Elsewhere in the Autobiographies, Yeats gave this detailed explanation of the occasion of the poem:

Homesick, and perhaps love-sick also. Elsewhere, as in “When You are Old and Full of Sleep”, Yeats addressed Maud Gonne directly. It is not entirely the kindly love-poem that it is often thought to be since he manages to be very monitory at the same time as ‘talking up’ his spiritual devotion for her. Indeed, the first premise of the poem is that she will grow old and hence very different from the beautiful woman that she is today. It is not, therefore, entirely aimable to assert of his own passion for her that ‘one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you, / And loved the sorrows of your changing face’. In the context, changing face bears a double import.

The poem that Maud Gonne professed to like best of all was “Red Hanhran’s Song About Ireland” - a piece that incorporates the political sentiments of the Jacobite aisling (or vision-poem lamenting the destruction of Gaelic society by the forces of Protestant England under William III), and apotheosises the secret loyalty of the Irish to a personification of Ireland (Cathleen ni Houlihan) while borrowing a form of religious worship that was somewhat foreign to Yeats’s personal experience as an Irish Protestant:

The poem appeared in 1894; in 1902 Maud Gonne appeared in title role of Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan, and thus embodied in her own striking person the female personification involved in it. She appeared there as an old woman, but everyone watching knew what she was like in her own person; and when, at the end of the play, it is reported that she has been seen walking down the road towards the rebel army in rejuvenated beauty and with ‘the walk of a queen’ it took no great imagination on the part of a fervently nationalist audience to imagine how she seemed.

By 1910, however, Yeats’s perspective on Maud Gonne and her advocacy of Irish physical-force nationalism had changed radically; and, though he still regarded her as a Greek ‘Athene’ thrown down into modern times, he now characterises her revolutionary fervour in the poem “No Second Troy” as a useless and destructive force emanating from great physical beauty with tragic yet inevitable consequences for the poet and lesser men:

It is evident here that he doesn’t think the Irish nationalists with whom she consorts have the kind of courage necessary to launch a rebellion, and this was a verdict which he would subsequently have to revised under the pressure of events surrounding the Easter Rising of 1916. In the meantime, Maud Gonne seemed to him like a reincarnation of an ancient heroic spirit, unsuited to modern times.

In later poems still, he likened her to ‘an old bellows full of angry wind’ (“A Prayer for My Daughter”) and developed a conception according to which he saw her heart - and those whom she misled - as being turned into a ‘stone’ that ‘troubles’ (or obstructs) the ‘living stream’. It is not a conception of womanhood, or of life, that the reader is likely to take seriously in our time.