Irish Literature

UNIT 1—MODERN CLASSICS

In this document, you will find a critical background summarizing some of the main
events in Yeats’s life, as well as some information about the influences on this poetry
and the stages in his poetic production. This information will help you better approach
and understand the main themes and topics of the poems contained in the “Literary
Analysis” document for this unit.

But first, and in order to understand the literary works studied in Units 1 and 2 (Joyce,
Yeats, and the post Irish civil-war realist short-story writers), please see the following
summary of the of the main events of the beginning of the twentieth century. These
are probably the most influential in the history of contemporary Ireland.

TIMELINE of Irish historical events

➢ 1914 HOME RULE—led by Parnell. A Government of Ireland Act that would let
Ireland some self-government activity under the supervision of the British
Parliament. It was postponed by IWW. Many were not in favor since it did not
mean complete independence.

➢ 1916 EASTER RISING—led by Pearse and Connolly. A revolutionary act organized

by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Irish volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army,
who took over the streets of Dublin and other cities. It was a civilian uprising. In
Dublin the leaders invaded the General Post Office in Dublin and read publicly the
proclamation of the Irish Republic. The leaders were executed by British troops,
500 people were killed and 2,600 wounded. This was a rebellion of the Catholic
Republican majority of the population as a result of the Irish nationalistic
progression that followed the rejection to the of Home Rule system offered by the
British government.

➢ 1918 SINN FÉIN—the Nationalistic political party reached majority and rejected
Home Rule for a more independent option, they aimed at the independence of
the Republic of Ireland.

➢ 1919-1921 ANGLO-IRISH WAR—led by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) vs. the
British forces (Black and Tan). This was also known as the “Irish War of
Independence”. It resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended British rule over
26 counties in the island (what we know as Ireland) and left 6 counties in the
North under British rule (Northern Ireland).

➢ 1921 IRISH FREE STATE—the self-governing Irish Free State is proclaimed.

Northern Ireland (with Protestant majority) is established.

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➢ 1922-1923 IRISH CIVIL WAR—fought by pro-Treaty forces led by Michael Collins

with British support (in favor of the Irish Free State) vs. anti-Treaty forces led by
Eamon de Valera with the Irish Republican Army’s support (in favor of a whole
Republic and rejecting the project of the Irish Free State).

➢ 1937 The Irish Free State becomes ÉIRE or IRELAND.

W.B. Yeats
CRITICAL BACKGROUND

INTRODUCTION TO AUTHOR AND CONTEXT

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was one of the most influential Irish poets of the late 19th
century and first half of the 20th century. He was born in a Protestant Anglo-Irish family
with properties but not too much money. The family was open to nationalistic changes
in the country; his father was a painter and artist. The Protestant Anglo-Irish, who
were known as the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, had inherited aristocratic status from the
first British colonizers in Ireland and were landowners of the Catholic peasantry (most
of the population in Ireland and natives of the country).

Yeats spent his childhood in his family’s properties in County Sligo, in the West
Coast of Ireland. This place was relevant because he was in contact with the rural
population, enjoyed the overwhelming natural landscapes and got fond of oral Irish
folktale, legends and mythology that were very much alive as part of the Irish culture
of the area. On the other hand, he also lived and studied in London with his family and
was very much influenced by the British Romantic movement, especially by the
Romantic poets Percy Shelley and William Blake. This mix of rural and urban
experiences made him understand that Ireland needed to recover a particular culture
whose essence should be a mixture of:

- the idiosyncratic imaginary world of pre-Christian Ireland (Celtic culture) and the rich
poetic tradition of this culture;

- the English language and cultural heritage. Because of this, he was heavily criticized
by purist nationalistic writers that considered Gaelic should be the language to bring
forwards the Irish Literary Revival.

We should make a distinction between three phases in Yeats’s poetic

development:

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- Late Romantic phase (from the 1880s to 1909 when he meets Modernist American
poet Ezra Pound);

- Modernist and Political period (the first two decades of the 20th c.);

- Late poetry (late 1920s and 1930s until his death).

1880s to 1909: LATE ROMANTICISM AND THE RECOVERY OF THE CELTIC PAST

From the first period, we can highlight the author’s incursion in occultism and
spiritualism. In 1890 he joins the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a masonry-
based society for men and women that studied ways to achieve spiritual development
through magic and the occult. The Order believed that spiritual enlightenment could
be found in the study of the inner nature of things, what cannot be seen but caught in
the power of symbols. At the time, there was a connection between occultism and
Celticism (interest in Celtic ancient culture) as a way of reaching wisdom through
alternative ways of knowing and perceiving the world. Yeats was also an avid reader of
Hinduism.

These varied interests (occultism, spirituality, Celtic magic, Hinduism) derive, in

part, from Romanticism itself and its aversion to Modernity’s ways of knowing and the
cultural development that they implied: capitalism, materialism, pragmatism, urbanity,
science and reason. Yeats fought this new modernity because he thought it was an
artificial culture that desecrated the human spirit and imagination. He did this by
focusing on the “anti-materialist forms of truth” (Cambridge Companion 129) found in
Irish ancient history, culture and literature that he thought was still alive in the
imagination of Irish folklore, its oral tradition and in the ancient Gaelic literature of the
past (sagas, legends, Celtic heroic cycles, ballads, etc.) where “a visionary knowledge
now lost to people of the cities” and “the essential transhistorical truths about human
experience” could be found (Cambridge Companion 139).

Yeats saw art as spiritual quest. This vision sprung from the Celtic figure of the fili:
the druid visionary sage, the art maker, who transmitted wisdom, culture, and magical
knowledge through poetic language in pre-Christian Ireland and was considered part of
the aristocracy, as important as kings and warriors) (New Princeton Encyclopedia “Irish
Poetry”). There was a heroic, magical and powerful understanding of the poetic
process and the poet as social figure in Celtic civilization before Christianity arrived (5 th
c.) in Ireland. After Christianity settled, this poetic tradition was kept and maintained in
the scholarly work of monks in monasteries, who translated into Latin most of the
poetry originally written in Gaelic. After the Norman invasion (12th c.), he fili became
merely a bard: a versifier of heroic and historical narrative poems and love lyric at
court. The strong poetic tradition in Ireland from the Celtic times to the 17th century

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developed into the craft of a complex stylistics, strict versification and syllabic metrical
patterns and a sophisticated use of language and image; it is considered to be the
oldest and richest vernacular poetic tradition in Europe. The British invasion by
Cromwell (mid 17th c.) brought about the decline of the Irish poetic tradition started
with the British invasion by Cromwell In one century, English culture colonized most of
Ireland geographically and culturally, and although poets mourned “the collapse of the
old order” through poetic lament, the poet and poetry in Ireland lost the central
position it had gained and came to be regarded as marginal in culture and society.
From this period dates the genre of the aisling (vision in Gaelic), where the poet
narrates the vision of a beautiful woman (the personification of Ireland) complaining of
her captivity and foreseeing liberation and salvation (New Princeton Encyclopedia).

Yeats knew about the strength of the Irish poetic tradition before Cromwell. He
believed that “there is no fine nationality without literature, and … no fine literature
without nationality” (Cambridge Companion 130) and he placed himself in the heroic
role of “asserting the distinctiveness of Irishness as cultural identity” through the
imaginative resource found in the Irish literary past in order to build a consistent Irish
literary tradition (idem.). The poet, in a fili mode, he believed, “could voice, intensify
and transform the preoccupations of his milieu” (Cambridge Companion 134). In his
time, with the rise of Irish nationalism, it was mainly the issue of searching for a
national identity and culture.

Other aspects recovered from the Celtic past and ancient history and culture by
Yeats, apart from the centrality of the figure of the fili, belong to the Irish mythology
that could be found in The Celtic Sagas or Cycles (Fenian, Ulster and Heroic Cycles) and
Folk-Tales. From the Ulster Cycle we should highlight the semi-god and hero Cú
Chulainn and the tragedy of Deirdre.

Did you know…?

Deirdre was believed to be a beautiful

Irish heroine who falls in love with the hunter
of the king of Ulster (now Northern Ireland),
eloping with him to live happily in Scotland.
She is found and killed by the king due to
jealousy, a sense of treason and hurt honor.
She is regarded as the woman whose beauty
caused the division of the nation, bringing
war and bloodshed.
Deirdre by artist Helen Stratton.
Wikimedia Commons.

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Yeats’s political involvement in Irish nationalism was triggered by his love for Maud
Gonne (his muse), an Irish revolutionary woman with whom Yeats was in love almost
all his life and proposed marriage up to four times. Although Yeats’s love was
unrequited, for a long time he was in contact with Gonne’s circles, the Irish Republican
Brotherhood. This brotherhood organized in 1916 the declaration of the Irish Republic
and were executed by the British repression in what is known as the Easter Rising.

In 1896 another important event happened in Yeats’s life. He met Lady Gregory, a
rich Anglo-Irish who was, like him, very much interested in recovering Celtic and Irish
ancient literature and culture. Together with other intellectuals, they founded the
Abbey Theatre where plays about the new Irish nationalism and Celtic cycles were
staged. Their circle also published translations of Irish folktales and mythology. This
cultural dynamic activity at the end of the 19th century and very early 20th c. is known
as the Irish Literary Revival or Renaissance (also Celtic Twilight). The movement, of
which Yeats was a central figure, had the objective to build up a national
consciousness through the recovery of the literary and cultural past of Irish roots and
origins.

1900-1920. MODERNISM AND POLITICS

Please note: The poems underlined below are included in this Unit’s “Literary
Analysis” document. You can also choose to read them along the information
explained here for better contextualization.

Yeats’s second poetic phase or middle period marks his incursion into Modernism
and the beginning of a deception with the causes of Irish nationalism. The reading of
Nietzsche and the meeting of Ezra Pound (they met in 1909 and lived two years
together until 1916) influenced Yeats’s poetry profoundly. Pound was the founder of
Imaginism and one of the fathers of American Modernist poetry. Modernism changed
Yeats’s poetic style by changing his perception of poetic language and expression; he
wanted “to leave behind sentiment and sentimental sadness. He wished poems to
carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self and personality [combining] the colloquial
with the formal, enacting a more austere diction, casual rhythms and passionate
syntax that left behind the poetic embroideries of his youth to walk ‘naked’
[developing] a less mannered, more stripped down style”. This is perceived in his
modernist poem “A Coat” (Norton 2020).

This phase is also marked by Yeats’s deception with Irish nationalism. This change
of attitude towards politics sprang from two sources:
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- the impossibility he saw in joining the cultural binaries of Catholics and

Protestants due to deeply rooted hate and fight;

- and the uncomfortable position of being turned into a public political poet
supporting the Irish revolutionaries. This had never become his objective, since he still
believed in the solitary and private task of poetic work (the fili, although culturally
influential was a wise druid, and not a king or a warrior).

The two poems of “September 1913” and “Easter, 1916” deal with aspects of the
Irish nation that he dislikes (first), but that paradoxically also admires (second),
expressing the deception of what he sees as the impossibility of solution to the
conflicts of Irish identity and society:

- The first poem criticizes the Catholic middle-class that is becoming upper class
through business but that lacks an educated sensibility to art and culture. Yeats sees
through this Catholic middle-class the destruction through modernity and capitalism of
what he thinks was the noble characteristic of Irish society, since true values were
found in the Anglo-Irish aristocratic class and in the Catholic peasantry.

- “Easter, 1916” is a poem exalting the braveness and power of imagination and
illusion for Irish identity found in the rebels of the Easter Rising, most of them his
friends, who were finally executed—including Maud Gonne’s husband. It is after the
Easter Rising that Yeats starts to see how the revolutionary spirit of Catholic
Republicans lacked a flexible reasoning impulse to be able to come out of the fight
ever and reach agreements for the sake of the nation’s well-being, a flexibility that he
understood as the acceptance of the weight of a British cultural inclusion into the Irish
identity.

LATE 1920´S-1939: LATE POETRY

After being rejected in his new proposal of marriage to Maud Gonne (and then to
her twenty-year old daughter) he purchased a Norman Tower in Lady Gregory’s
property in Galway (his beloved west coast of Ireland), named it Thoor Ballylee and
lived there with his wife Georgie Hyde Lee, until his death in 1939. Lee was a
practitioner and believer of esoteric writing and art, and was only twenty-five when
she married Yeats (fifty-two at the time).

Yeats’s late poetry focuses on the dilemmas of the human soul and search for
spiritual enlightenment through mysticism and religion, moving away from the quest
of finding an Irish identity in cultural roots that had marked his first and second period.
In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

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Yeats was able to see the complexity and contradiction of human life. This was
probably related to his mix of Protestant origin, his appreciation of the British cultural
heritage in Ireland, and his love for the Irish roots found in the nation’s ancient culture,
spirit and literature: “Throughout his poetry he meditates between contending aspects
of himself—late-Romantic visionary and astringent modern skeptic, Irish patriot and
irreverent antinationalist, shrewd man of action and esoteric dreamer …. conceiving
consciousness as conflict” (Norton 2021).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

➢ Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2.

London and New York: WW Norton & Company, 2006
➢ Cambridge Companion to W.B. Yeats
➢ “Irish Poetry” New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
➢ Oxford Companion to Irish Literature

➢ SELF-STUDY ACTIVITIES and RESEARCH

 Do independent reading on some of the concepts mentioned in this Unit following

these steps:

1. Click on this link to the Oxford Companion of English Literature. To access the
Companion, make sure you’re signed in with your UNED username.

2. Look for the following terms and read the entries:

Deirdre / Cú Chulainn / Ulster Cycle / Literary Revival (Irish Literary Society)

 If you have time for more, read the entry on “Irish poetry” in The New Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (click here).