1

[This was read out at the International Conference on Ethnicity, Identity and Literature,
organized by Sibsagar College Assam 10th October, 2012-15th October, 2014. It was
published in the Seminar Proceedings Volume].

W. B. YEATS’S POETRY: CRYSTALLIZING IRISH ETHNIC AND NATIONAL

IDENTITY

ABSTRACT

Myths and folklore often help create ethnic and national identity. Common shared heroic or
subjugated backgrounds serve as focal points around which people can rally to a common
cause. When the questions of ethnicity, identity and their impact upon literature, and vice-
versa, are mentioned the poetry of W. B. Yeats has to be reckoned with as a force which
was both influenced by and deeply influenced the crystallization of Irish ethnicity and
identity through the unearthing of myths and Celtic folklore lost in the palimpsest of time.
The poetry and plays of W.B. Yeats often take subject matter from traditional Celtic
folklore and myth, incorporating them into his work, in the form of stories and characters
of Celtic origin, he endeavours to encapsulate something of the national character of his
beloved Ireland. The reasons and motivations for Yeats' use of Celtic themes can be
understood in terms of the author’s own sense of nationalism as well as an overriding
personal interest in mythology and the oral traditions of folklore. During Yeats' early
career, there was an ongoing literary revival of interest in Irish legend and folklore. The
folklore, myth, and legends of ancient Celtic traditions gave Yeats a rich well of inspiration
to draw from. By not falling into the trap of overly romanticizing his work, as many other
authors of the time would do, Yeats was able to help begin a tradition of another sort, the
Irish literary tradition. By placing importance on the Irish culture in his work, Yeats
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fulfilled his own sense of national pride to the delight of his readers and audiences and to
the chagrin of many of his English contemporaries who felt that nothing of value or worthy
of study could come out of Ireland. My paper intends to explore how Yeats uses Celtic
myths and folklore in his poetry in order to create an Irish ethnic identity and also
crystallize the struggle for nationalism, while widening ethnic identity from a narrow
definition to a wider one, with reference to some of his important and relevant poems.

PAPER

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them
carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into
whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like
another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not
unbecome me. (O’Brien 141)

The epigraph to this paper are Yeats’s own words about his poetry – which at once
sought to draw from the well of the common social-psyche of Irish heritage but at the same
time was interwoven with the present through the looms of the poet’s transforming
imagination that sought to transcend the narrow bounds of fundamental and essentialist
agenda ingrained in a segment of the Irish revival. In the works of William Butler Yeats the
Celtic aspect of Irishness was of prime importance. This becomes clear in the titles of
Yeats’s earliest works, where Celtism and folklore are the core ingredients. In 1888 he
published Fairy and Folk Tales; in 1889, his first book of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin,
and other Poems was published; in 1892 The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and
Lyrics was published while 1893 saw the publication of the Celtic Twilight. In all of these
works, Yeats was attempting to express some deep element of Irishness which would allow
him to participate fully in the Irish literary and cultural revival.
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Myths and folklore often help create ethnic and national identity. Common shared
heroic or subjugated backgrounds serve as focal points around which people can rally to a
common cause. When the questions of ethnicity, identity and their impact upon literature,
and vice-versa, are mentioned the poetry of W. B. Yeats has to be reckoned with as a
powerful force which was both influenced by and deeply influenced the crystallization of
Irish ethnicity and identity through the unearthing of myths and Celtic folklore lost in the
palimpsests of time. The poetry and plays of W.B. Yeats often take subject matter from
traditional Celtic folklore and myth, incorporating them into his work, in the form of stories
and characters of Celtic origin, he endeavours to encapsulate something of the national
character of his beloved Ireland. The reasons and motivations for Yeats' use of Celtic
themes can be understood in terms of the author’s own sense of nationalism as well as an
overriding personal interest in mythology and the oral traditions of folklore. During Yeats'
early career, there was an ongoing literary revival of interest in Irish legend and folklore.
The folklore, myth, and legends of ancient Celtic traditions gave Yeats a rich well of
inspiration to draw from. By not falling into the trap of overly romanticizing his work, as
many other authors of the time would do, Yeats was able to help begin a tradition of
another sort, the Irish literary tradition. By placing importance on the Irish culture in his
work, Yeats fulfilled his own sense of national pride to the delight of his readers and
audiences and to the chagrin of many of his English contemporaries who felt that nothing
of value or worthy of study could come out of Ireland, by rendering an Irishness to them in
the English language! It would be interesting to explore how Yeats uses Celtic myths and
folklore in his poetry in order to create an Irish ethnic identity and also crystallize the
struggle for nationalism, while widening ethnic identity from a narrow definition – race,
language and religion – to a wider one, with reference to some of his important and
relevant poems.
W. B. Yeats was one of the vanguards of Irish Literary Renaisance. He enlarged the
panorama of modern English Poetry with Celtic mythology. Much of Yeats’s childhood
was spent in Sligo with his mother’s family where he developed a lifelong interest in
country people and the rural way of life. Thus, Yeats’s poetry is dominated by the Irish
element right from the beginning, comprising of Irish heroic tales, belief in magic and faith
in Anima Mundi. F. R. Leavis in his New Bearings in English Poetry remarks upon the
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deep significance of the Irish element in his poetry: ‘Mr. Yeats starts in the English
tradition, but he is from the outset an Irish poet’(Leavis 34). In fact much of Yeats’s early
poetry shows a marked Irish programme and the richness of ethnic elements drawn from
Gaelic folklore and myth. Celtic myth and symbolism gave his poetry both richness and a
nationalistic vigour that was relevant in the years of the Irish Literary Revival, of which he
came to be a key figure. As early as at the age of twenty-two he wrote in a letter to
Katharine Tynan regarding his wishes to lay the foundations of: ‘a school of Irish poetry,
founded on Irish myth and history, a neo-romantic movement’(Sen 2). Yeats was moved by
the rich mythology of heroism of Ireland and worshipped it and sought to gift to those
ignorant of its richness, through his poetry with the dual aims of instilling a sense of
solidarity and pride in the Irish people dismissed by the English as having nothing rich
enough to be proud of and also to let the world, enamoured by Greek and Latin myths,
marvel at the greatness of Irish folkloric figures and mythical characters. Yeats wrote thus:
‘If we will but tell these stories to our children, the land will begin again to be a Holy Land,
as it was before men gave their hearts to Greece and Rome and Judea’(Explorations 12-13).
The myths of Aengus, Cuchulain and Queen Maeve show in simple diction Yeats’s efforts
to retrieve the heroic traditions of the Gaelic past. Cuchulain was akin to the Greek hero
Achilles, the mightiest of the Gaelic heroes and his heroic deeds and tragic end resonated in
Yeats’s mind as symbolic of the fate of Ireland, and thus Cuchulain recurs in his poetry a
powerful element reminding his Irish readers of their indigenous heroism. The Death of
Cuchulain enumerates the sad tale of the hero and his son Conula, where not recognizing
his identity Cuchulain slays him in a single combat and later after the discovery becomes
mad with grief and dies fighting the sea waves. Bhabatosh Chatterjee comments : ‘Yeats in
the early poems, treats the Celtic legends in a narrative or dramatic form. . . Yeats also
creates new myths out of old and his Oisin, Fergus, King Goll, and Cuchulain, while
retaining their individual characters as depicted in the legends, mirror the poet’s own
personality’ (Chatterjee 28).
Yeats was of the opinion that Political identity of Ireland could only be attained
through Cultural revival through the recognition of a unity of purpose and ethnic identity,
for which it was necessary for Irish people and poets to ‘Absorb Ireland and her tragedy . . .
be the poet of a people, perhaps the poet of an insurrection’ and indeed following the 1916
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Rising he had a crisis of conscience, wondering whether his play Cathleen ni Houlihan
might have inspired some of the participants in the Rising:
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?

Thus, much of Yeats’s work could be interpreted as promoting the ideal of an independent
republic free from the taint of anglicisation, the drama Cathleen ni Houlihan being his most
overtly republican work, hinting at the fact that Irish political union or identity was
unrealizable unless the imagination of its people was fired by the sense of pride and awe at
sharing a common glorious heritage, reminiscent of the heroic ages of Cuchulain, Finn,
Conchubar, Deidre and imagine Ireland as Cathleen ni Houlihaan, the epitome of feminine
strength and beauty. Yet there was danger in confusing myth with real life and Yeats
realized this after the Easter Rising of 1916!
In London literary circles Yeats always felt like an exile and yearned to be at one
with Ireland which became for him not just a particular land or nation but a state of mind
associated with calmness and peace, which he depicts romantically in ‘The Lake Isle of
Innisfree’. Yeats was deeply influenced by the Fenian John O’ Leary and the likes of Lady
Gregory and was prompted to sing the glory of manly and rugged Ireland and of its people.
In ‘Under Ben Bulben’ he urges Irish poets:
Irish poets learn your trade
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter.

Among many of his poems with clear streaks of nationalistic vigour ‘To Ireland in the Coming
Times’(The Rose) is one where Yeats tries to justify the role of his poetry in the cause of Irish
nationalism. ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’ has often been cited as an example of the young
Yeats’s nationalism. Denis Donoghue argues that in this poem Yeats tries to find a place for
himself in the honourable list of the Protestant nationalists. The poem starts with a description
of a time when ‘Eire’, an ancient name for Ireland, was a free country ruled by the Irish:
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There was a green branch hung with many a bell

When her own people ruled this tragic Eire;
And from its murmuring greenness, calm of Faery,
A Druid kindness, on all hearers fell
The elements – faery, Druid, the greenery are clear symbols of Irishness which recur in Yeats’s
poetry. The very reference to a free Ireland ruled by the Irish implies that the present Ireland is
not free and is controlled by foreigners. In the last stanza, the poet emphasizes that all his
poetic accomplishments and whatever he writes is for his country:
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.

Yeats endeavours to prove his sincere and whole-hearted commitment to his country, so he
declares,
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.

However what is noticeable is that these final lines do not address a present audience; their
appeal is to a future Ireland. This suggests that Yeats was not satisfied with or sure about the
reception and the relevance of his artistic work by the audience of his own time. Ironically, one
of the most nationalist poems of the early Yeats’s turns into the poet’s attempt to vigorously
justify the relevance of his aesthetic poetry to the sceptic nationalists. In some early poems
nationalism and the poet’s nationalist stance has a stronger presence; it is the main theme or
one of the main themes of the poem. This need for justifying his nationalism at every step
arises from the dismissal of Yeats’s poetry by the nationalists who denounced his contribution
to Irish ethnic and cultural revival because, firstly he wrote in English and secondly he depicted
Irishness as steeped in dreaminess, magic, myths distanced greatly from the harsh struggles of
the peasant class under English rule. An influential biographer and scholar of the Irish poet,
Richard Ellmann describes the young Yeats as giving us ‘the impression of a man in a frenzy,
beating on every door in the hotel in an attempt to find his own room’. Even Padriac Pearse,
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one of the leading revolutionaries and martyrs of Easter 1916, which Yeats would later glorify
in his poetry, could describe him in such demeaning terms:
Against Mr. Yeats personally, we have nothing to object. He is a mere English poet of
the third or fourth rank and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an
“Irish” Literary Theatre it is time for him to be crushed (O’Brien 128-129)

The harshness of Pearse’s views and that of the Revivalists in general was based on the
argument that Irish revival should be in Gaelic language. Because the key figures in the literary
revival, Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory, wrote in English, thereby establishing a benchmark
for future expressions of Irish identity, both in terms of its constitution, and in terms of its
mode of expression. They attempted to invoke some basic markers of identity, notably Celtism,
ancient Irish myths and sagas (in translation), and the rugged topography of the Irish landscape.
However, by the very act of writing in English, they were undermining a seminal aspect of
Irish-Ireland’s identity – the language. If Yeats wrote in English, then ipso facto, he was an
‘English poet’ in Pearse’s terms. Hence the vitriolic dismissal of Yeats as someone of little
consequence. Yeats’s aim was to write in a way what would be the ‘matter of Ireland’, but
in the English language, given his own inability to learn Irish to any reasonable standard.
While this lack of knowledge was a factor in his desire to create an Irish identity in the
English language, there can be little doubt that he also had an epistemological and ethical
incentive. By so doing, he would radically transform the ‘matter of Ireland’. His own
historical tradition of Anglo-Irishness would have been English speaking, but he, and his
sisters, saw this as no reason as to why they should not be deemed ‘Irish’. He puts the
situation succinctly in a typical Yeatsian epigraph: ‘Gaelic is my national language but it is
not my mother tongue’ (Yeats: 1961; 520). In response to a grave fear expressed by Dr.
Hyde that the Gaelic language would soon die out, Yeats asks:
Is there, then, no hope for the de-Anglicising of our people? Can we not build up a
national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit
from being English in language? Can we not keep the continuity of the nation’s life,
not by trying to do what Dr. Hyde has practically pronounced impossible, but by
translating and retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of
rhythm and style, all that is best in the ancient literature? Can we not write and
persuade others to write histories and romances of the great Gaelic men of the past,
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from the son of Nessa to Owen Roe, until there has been made a golden bridge
between the old and the new? (O’Brien 142)

It is this transforming of essentialist concepts of nationality that sets the early Yeats apart from
many other revivalists. That he still locates the core of Irish identity in the past is undeniable;
however, even at this stage there is a willingness to attempt to broaden stereotypical notions of
Irishness, as well as the rhetorical skill to attempt to deanglicize Ireland through the medium of
translation into English! His view of ‘nationhood’ was definitely more interrogative than that
of many of the Gaelic revivalists. Language, the inability of restoring Gaelic to its past glory
would not be regarded by him as an impediment in the way of shaping present Irish identity nor
as repository of national pride for posterity.
It is true that Yeats’s poetry, just has his outlook, towards Irish political ascendancy
and revival underwent several changes over the years. Yeats’s famous poem, which
commemorates the Easter rising of 24 April 1916, was written in the aftermath of the
unsuccessful nationalist uprising in Dublin against British rule. On that decisive day in
Irish contemporary history, under the leadership of Patrick Pearse and James Connolly
around 1600 members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood rose against the colonial rule of
England. Yeats’s reaction was: ‘I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move
me – and I am very despondent about the future. At the moment I feel all the work of years
has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature
and criticism from politics’ (L, 613). This amalgam of respect and annoyance, grief and
horror, which would later permeate ‘Easter 1916’, is quite evident in this letter. On the one
hand, Yeats could not negate the deep impact which the Rising has had on his worldview and
on the other hand, he could not help expressing his discomfort, borne out of shock and
disappointment, at the outcomes of that disturbing event. Yeats had already declared the death
of Romantic Ireland in ‘September 1913’ where he regarded the same group which led the
Uprising of 1916 with contempt thus:
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
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It came to him as a shock that the members of the money-grabbing Catholic middle-class he
had so harshly criticized in poems such as ‘Paudeen’ and ‘September 1913’ could rise to such a
heroic stature as martyrs for a high ideal. The same people, who had up to then been the object
of his contempt, are now depicted in a heroic way. Their heroic deed caused him to revise his
sense of contemporary Ireland. Although Yeats does not forget to refer to their bourgeois
background, this time the fact that the rebels belong to the middle-class coming from behind
counter or desk does not imply any pejorative sense. Rather, they are somehow being
romanticized by their bright complexion, their ‘vivid faces’ suggesting their vigorous
liveliness, powerful feelings and youthful enthusiasm:
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses

Then Yeats goes on to describe his everyday encounters with these people before the rebellion.
He certainly did not take them seriously and respectfully. But however they had looked before
within the poem, the participation of ordinary citizens in the events of the Easter Rising has
drastically altered them:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born

The oxymoron ‘terrible beauty’ suggests Yeats’s double reaction to what has happened. On
the one hand the sacrifice of the martyrs for their people is aestheticised; on the other hand
it is seen as a profoundly disturbing act. Yeats is thus both attracted and appalled by the
Rising. Initially Yeats in his works espoused essentialist notions of identity by combining
place, race, and a particular ethnic accent to mythologize ‘old Eire and the ancient ways’.
However, at a certain stage in his writing, Yeats saw the dangers inherent in such an
essentializing view of identity. His treatment of the Cuchulain myth, a pivotal trope in the
literature of the revival, indexes his change of attitude, as he goes on to espouse a
pluralistic and dialogic vision of what it means to be Irish. The relationship between
people, language, and land is seen as a motivated and quasi-organic one, which is a
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defining factor in the creation of notions of Irish identity. Despite the dreamy quality of his
poetry and his aristocratic temper and his inability to face the facts of present day Ireland
Yeats and the Literary Revival did indeed contribute to the formation of the new sense of
national identity that was also being promoted by agencies such as the Gaelic Athletic
Association and the Gaelic League. Yeats was but one of a number of forces contributing
to the formation of the new Irish sense of national identity, and to the new sense of
confidence which would induce some to strive for a new Ireland. And he thus states,
poignantly, that he not be differentiated from the nationalists just because he aspires
towards more transcendental things but:

Know, that I would accounted be

True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song….
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson.

Thus, through using the language of the colonizer Yeats was able to create an Irish identity that
was at once reckoned with honour at the same time dissevering ‘irishness’ from the narrow
confines of place, race, language and religion to mean a state of being and mind that had a
broader locale and definition.

Works Cited:

Chatterjee, Bhabatosh. The Poetry of W.B.Yeats. Calcutta: Sarat Book Distributors, 1962.
Print.

Sen, S.C. Four Essays on the Poetry of Yeats. Shantiniketan: Viswa Bharati, 1968. Print.

Kearney, Richard (ed.). States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Continental

Thinkers. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Print.
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Leavis, F. R. New Bearings in English Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus, 1941. Print.

O’ Brien, Eugene. The Question of Irish Identity in the Writing of W. B. Yeats and James
Joyce. limerick.academia.edu/EugeneOBrien/Books/140672/The_Question - 639k-. Web.

Meimandi, Mohammad Nabi. ‘JUST AS STRENUOUS A NATIONALIST AS EVER’,

W.B. YEATS AND POSTCOLONIALISM: TENSIONS, AMBIGUITIES, AND
UNCERTAINTIES. Phd. Thesis. University of Birmingham, 2007.

Yeats, W.B. Explorations. London: Macmillan, 1962. Print.