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Commentary on Yeats: Recent
Irish Responses
Seamus Deane, A Short
History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson 1986), ‘‘From
the beginning therefore there is an intimate connection between his political
vision of Ireland and occultism. The kingdom of Faery was, in his view,
a natural part of the old civilisation which English puritanism and its
Irish middle-class descendants had destroyed.’ (p.142.[ top ]
Seamus Deane, Heroic Styles: The Tradition
of an Idea [Field Day Pamphlet, No. 4] (Derry: Field Day 1984), ‘A
poem like "Ancestral Houses" owed its force to the vitality
with it offers a version of Ascendancy history as true in itself. The
truth of this historical reconstruction of the Ascendancy is not cancelled
by our simply saying No, it was not like that. For its ultimate validity
is mythical, not historical. In this case, the mythical element is given
prominence by the meditation on the fate of an originary energy which
it becomes so effective that it transforms nature into civilisation, and
is then transformed itself by civilisation into decadence. The poem, then,
appears to have a story to tell, and, along with that, an interpretation
of the story’s meaning. It operates on the narrative and on the conceptual
planes and at the intersection of these it emerges, for many readers,
as a poem about the tragic nature of human existence itself. Yeats’s
life, through the mediations of history and myth, becomes an embodiment
of essential existence.’ (p.6.) ‘Yeats’s promiscuity in
his courtship of heroic figures - Cuchulainn, John O’Leary, Parnell,
the 1916 leaders, Synge, Mussolini, Kevin O’Higgins, General O’Duffy
- is an understandable form of anxiety in one who sought to find in a
single figure the capacity to give reality to a spiritual leadership for
which (as he consistently admitted) the conditions had already disappeared.
Such figures could only operate as symbols. Their significance lay in
their disdain for the provincial, squalid aspects of a mob culture which
is the Yeatsian version of the other face of Irish nationalism. It could
provide him culturally with a language of renovation, but it provided
neither art nor civilization. That had come, politically, from the connection
between England and Ireland.’ (p.8.) ‘Yeats’s preoccupation
with the occult, and Synge’s with the lost language of Ireland are
both minority positions which have, as part of their project, the revival
of worn social forms, not their overthrow. The disaffection inherent in
these positions is typical of the Anglo-Irish criticism of the failure
of English civilization in Ireland, but it is articulated for an English
audience which learned to regard all these adversarial positions as essentially
picturesque manifestations of the Irish sensibility.’ (p.9.)
Seamus Deane, ‘The Literary Myths of the
Revival’, in Celtic Revivals (Faber 1985; pb. 1987), pp.28-37:
‘The irony is that Yeats’s view of the Irish Catholic middle
classes is similar to the Irish Catholic view of the eighteenth-century
Protestant Ascendancy [...] he distorted history in the service of myth’
(p.32.) ‘The flimsy conception on which Yeats built his conception
of the Ascendancy and of the peasantry ultimately affects his poetry and
drama. All his ideas and images of tradition and communion are predicated
on the idea of spiritual loneliness’ [35];
Seamus Deane, ‘Yeats and the Idea of Revolution’,
in Celtic Revivals (Faber 1985; pbk. 1987), pp.38-50: ‘Yeats added
a certain melodrama to the situation by always investing it with a sense
of crisis. Ireland was not only a special country. It was one where the
great battle must be won precisely because it had been so totally lost
elsewhere. Ireland was, for him, a revolutionary country for the very
reason that it was, in the oldest sense, a traditional one. History, viewed
as crisis, became politics [39] Reincarnation seems to have been the most
fervently held of all Yeats’s private beliefs. [...] Death renders
life meaningless unless it life achieves a form which death cannot alter;
... a theory of human freedom realised under the aegis of death.’
(p.42.)
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Declan Kiberd, Anglo-Irish
Attitudes [Field Day Pamphlets, No. 6] (Derry: Field Day 1984): ‘Yeats’s
solution to this dilemma [of Anglo-Irish antithesis] was to gather a native
Irish audience and create a native Irish theatre in Dublin - to express
Ireland to herself rather than exploit her for the foreigner. He accepted
the Anglo-Irish antithesis, but only on the condition that he was allowed
to reinterpret it in a more flattering light. Whereas the English called
the Irish backward, superstitious and uncivilised, the Gaelic revivalists
created an [13] idealised counter-image which saw her as pastoral, mystical,
admirably primitive. Yet such a counter-image was false, if only because
it elevated a single aspect of Ireland into a type of the whole. "Connaught
for me is Ireland", said Yeats; but Ireland is not Connaught - rather
she is a patchwork quilt of cultures, as she was before the Normans invaded.
… the folklorism of Yeats confirmed the traditional image of the
Irish as subservient and menial - only now they were deemed menial and
colourful in interesting ways. "The cracked looking-glass of a servant"
is how Joyce’s hero Stephen described such an art. It is an apt image,
not just of Yeats hopeless rehabilitation of the modes of deference but
also of Joyce’s own escape into modernism, for what a cracked looking-glass
really shows is not a single but a multiple self.’ (pp.13-14.)
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Edward Said, Nationalism,
Colonialism and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization [Field Day Pamphlet,
No. 15] Derry 1988, 24pp.: ‘For Yeats the overlappings he knew existed
between his Irish nationalism and the English cultural tradition that
both dominated him and empowered him as a writer was bound to cause an
over-heated tension, and it is the pressure of this urgently political
and secular tension that one may speculate caused him to try to resolve
it on a "higher", that is, non-political, level. Thus the deeply
eccentric and aestheticised histories he produced in A Vision and the
later quasi-religious poems are elevations of the tension to an extra-worldly
level.’ (p.13.)
Seamus Heaney, ‘Introduction
to W. B. Yeats’, in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry:
Field Day Company 1991), Vol. 2: ‘Yeats’s singularity as a writer
depended upon [a] uniquely elaborated command of the strategies of English
verse; but it derived also from the off-centre view he deliberately maintained
as a member of occult societies ...Even an intelligence as strong and
antagonistic as James Joyce's functioned within a set of cultural and
intellectual forms that generally were shared and assented to. Homer and
classical learning, Roman catholic liturgy and dogma, the medieval corpus
of knowledge as represented by Dante and Aquinas...when Yeats called a
character Red Hanrahan or Michael Robartes...he still could not endow
the new-minted name with such canonical authority. There might well be
a reservoir of doctrine and belief which sanctioned the imaginative archetype...but
it had sunk underground. (p.786; quoted in Edna Longley, The Living
Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne:
Bloodaxe 1994, p.46.) Heaney further remarks that, ‘while it is right
that the questions [of Yeats’s and Joyce’s relation to the nation]
continue to be pressed, it is imperative to recognise the immense contribution
his work makes to our general intellectual and imaginative resource.’
(Ibid., p.789; Longley, p.46.)
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Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation
and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto
Press 1998): ‘[Yeats] hoped to maintain the centrality of Anglo-Ireland
to the emerging modern Irish nation by engaging in a critical discourse
through which he could define the relationship between culture and nation,
and thus shape what could legitimately be said about each.’ (p.73.)
‘It is [the] anti-materialist strain that constitutes Yeats’s
most important contribution to contempoary Irish cultural politics.’
(p.74.)
‘The paradox underpinning the statement [as infra] is the
paradox of liberal decolonisation: authentic national experience must
be possessed of a “supplementarity” which will secure for Anglo-Irish
a role in contemporary Ireland’ (p.75.)
‘Yeats denies the authenticity
of a criticism which springs from its own object, or an art which evokes
its own criticism. Criticism must vindicate Anglo-Irish experience by
having a relationship with its cultural object which is at once congruent
and discrepant’ (p.75.)
‘Liberal-decolonising [75] strategy
of this kind was always going to be of only limited use in the construction
of an irish identity and an Irish hsitory, because the terms in which
that identity and that history could be articulated were thoroughly informed
by metropolitan values and the logic of supplementarity through which
English colonialist discourse functioned.’ (Ibid., 75-76).
Smyth
quotes Yeats: ‘[T]he true ambition is to make criticism as international,
and literature as national, as possible.’ (Quoted in in Vinod Sena, W. B. Yeats as Poet and Critic, Macmillan 1980, p.8; here p.75.)
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