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W. B. Yeats: A Noble Antinomianism

Gould Warwick and Reeves Marjorie

in Joachim of Fiore

Joachim of Fiore occupies a curious and unexplored place in the history of William Butler Yeats's central preoccupations and, indeed, beliefs. Yeats seems to have furthered his knowledge of Joachim ... More

Joachim of Fiore occupies a curious and unexplored place in the history of William Butler Yeats's central preoccupations and, indeed, beliefs. Yeats seems to have furthered his knowledge of Joachim via the ‘theologian’ of the Irish movement, Lionel Johnson, who shared with him the fin de siècle fascination with antinomianism. Johnson not only translated Yeats's imitations of Joachimist doctrines into convincing Latin, but also served as the model for Yeats's Joachite hero Owen Aherne in the 1896 story ‘The Tables of the Law’. Yeats managed to reinterpret the ideas of the Eternal Evangel as he found them in the writings of Ernest Renan and his followers. The third status also became something of a personal metaphor or nexus of metaphors for the state of blessedness or momentary timelessness which Yeats thought about in his deepest religious poems. But his encounter with Joachimism needs to be filled in from the start if the extent to which Yeats accommodated Joachim to himself is to be demonstrated.Less

White Thin Bone: Yeatsian Personhood

Oren Izenberg

in Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life

This chapter examines the philosophical origins and political urgencies of William Butler Yeats's demand for “perfection” and “completeness.” It begins with a discussion of Yeats's conception of ... More

This chapter examines the philosophical origins and political urgencies of William Butler Yeats's demand for “perfection” and “completeness.” It begins with a discussion of Yeats's conception of extreme and paradoxical theories of poetic agency and why such an excessive account of poetic agency might have appeared necessary in his historical situation. It then considers Yeats's early and abiding commitment to the esoteric roots of symbolism and his late interest in eugenics, both of which addressed the local project of forging a counterfactual identity. It also shows how Yeats's poetry bridges the gap between the perfected Ireland he envisioned and the degraded one he conjured. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Yeats's explicit rebellion, not against his universalist notion of personhood, but against his own will to poetic mastery.Less

Poems, Poetry, Personhood

Oren Izenberg

in Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life

This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous ... More

This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.Less

Yeats’s Ritual of Revolt

Sinéad Garrigan Mattar

in Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival

It is in his dramatic work that there is most evidence of William Butler Yeats's reading of comparative science. Given both Yeats's literary primitivism and his supernaturalism, it was inevitable ... More

It is in his dramatic work that there is most evidence of William Butler Yeats's reading of comparative science. Given both Yeats's literary primitivism and his supernaturalism, it was inevitable that he should look to the religio-mythic origins of theatre when creating a drama in reaction against what he perceived as an over-modern stage. Yeats's very involvement in the theatre in Ireland was an extension of his interest in creating rituals for the ‘Castle of Heroes’ — an elite, occult centre in which ‘Celtic Mysteries’ would revive the ancient Irish gods of the earth. His ideal theatre was thus both an actual attempt to ‘bring again the Golden Age’ by reviving the ancient gods and heroes on the stage, and part of the ‘ritual of revolt’ of Celtic Ireland. The paradox of this ‘ritual of revolt’ is itself explained by the initiatory nature of the rituals with which Yeats worked and on which his theatre was to be based. This chapter looks at how the use of a collective experience in the theatre was related to Yeats's interest in occultism, mythology, and magic.Less

Yeats and Remorse

PETER McDONALD

in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill

The registers of regretful memory, or retrospective doubt and qualm, are central to William Butler Yeats's best poetry. These registers find their focus in his poetic vocabulary with the word ... More

The registers of regretful memory, or retrospective doubt and qualm, are central to William Butler Yeats's best poetry. These registers find their focus in his poetic vocabulary with the word ‘remorse’, a term which denotes something more than regret, though also one which suggests significance other than the purely occasional or personal for that regret. For Yeats, remorse exists in the most intimate relation to the poetic impulse, and happens even in the textures of the poetry itself. At the same time, remorse is a force against which the poetry exerts its own rhetorical counter-pressures. This chapter examines how Yeats expresses remorse in his poems, John Quinn's criticism of Yeats's alleged failure to ‘make himself over’ in relation to World War I, and Yeats's rejection of Sean O'Casey's play The Silver Tassie for the Abbey Theatre. Yeats's poem Reprisals, which follows a remorseless rhetorical course, is also discussed.Less

Cyclical Violence: The Irish Insurrection and the Limits of Enchantment

Sarah Cole

in At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland

This chapter takes as its scope the substantial canon of Irish literature in the first decades of the twentieth century that engaged intimately with violence. It argues that the expression of ... More

This chapter takes as its scope the substantial canon of Irish literature in the first decades of the twentieth century that engaged intimately with violence. It argues that the expression of violence can be understood according to four categories, each of which the chapter develops with respect to a host of writers, whose styles and political positions are widely divergent. The categories are not entirely parallel in structure, but together provide a capacious picture of the language of violence in the period: keening (or ritual lamentation), generative violence (the mode of the Rising), reprisal (the dark doppelganger of generativity), and allegory (in which the nation or body is likened to a tree or building). In tracing these four modes, the chapter invites a loosening of the ordinary political binaries that characterize criticism of this period. Prominent figures include, for keening, Synge and O'Casey; for generative violence, Synge, Yeats, Pearse, and other leaders of the Rising such as Plunkett and MacDonough; for reprisal, Mitchel, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey; and for allegory, Yeats. Ultimately, the chapter charts an entirely new scheme for reading the violence canon in this period, attuned to the historical shifts eventuated by uprising, war and the institution of the nation state.Less

The Aesthetics of Excess: Improvement and Revivalism

Helen O’connell

in Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement

Young Ireland rhetoric dominated Irish cultural institutions from the 1840s through to the Revival period. In the early 1890s, a young William Butler Yeats was embarking on his project to instil ... More

Young Ireland rhetoric dominated Irish cultural institutions from the 1840s through to the Revival period. In the early 1890s, a young William Butler Yeats was embarking on his project to instil aesthetic revivalism in Ireland, a project that was, in part, a response to the rationalizing ideologies of improvement modernization. For Yeats, those ideologies were literary as well as social and political in nature, achieving their most coherent expression in the 19th-century tradition of English realism. This chapter explores how Yeats's Revival was directed against those discourses of progress, counteracting realist assertions of linearity and causality with supernaturalism and ‘orality’. It is thus unsurprising that Yeats was to find himself at odds with the Young Ireland orthodoxies of the period. This chapter speculates that the Revival writings of Yeats, Douglas Hyde, and J.M. Synge were a product of the inevitable failures of both improvement discourse and Young Ireland nationalism.Less

Literature in English, 1921–84

Vivian Mercier

in A New History of Ireland Volume VII: Ireland 1921-84

The rubric ‘literature and society’, which seems irrelevant to much of the literary work produced in the period 1891–1921, comes into its own from 1922 onwards. Whereas the plays of William Butler ... More

The rubric ‘literature and society’, which seems irrelevant to much of the literary work produced in the period 1891–1921, comes into its own from 1922 onwards. Whereas the plays of William Butler Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and George Fitzmaurice — compounded of myth, folklore, and fantasy — had formerly dominated the Irish theatre, the prose realism that had certainly also been a part of the Abbey tradition in the works of William Boyle, Padraic Colum, T. C. Murray, Seumas O'Kelly, and Lennox Robinson now began to drive fantasy and verse from the Abbey stage. Irish drama became a more faithful reflection of contemporary Irish society. There has been a growing tendency in Ireland, north and south, for the arts to receive assistance from business and finance. Literature benefits through prizes offered for drama, fiction, and poetry; summer schools and international conferences often receive subsidies.Less

Yeats's Poetic Structures

PETER McDONALD

in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill

William Butler Yeats operates often by manipulating parallels between the notion of memory — of historical and personal versions of the past, and of posterities and perpetuities — and the workings in ... More

William Butler Yeats operates often by manipulating parallels between the notion of memory — of historical and personal versions of the past, and of posterities and perpetuities — and the workings in poetic structure in readers' memory in the returns and anticipations of rhyme, in the suspensions and resolutions of syntax, and in the larger recurrence of poems and parts of poems as the sounds of any reader's poetic knowledge. Yeats's poetic structures are evident in his poem Coole Park, 1929, whereby he commends his patroness to a posterity more enduring than that of her house. The ways in which Yeats's poems envisage or anticipate ruin are partly imitated in his poems' forms, but partly too they are undermined or questioned by the ways in which the forms cohere to provide a site on which the reader can be instructed to ‘take your stand’.Less

Yeats, Form, and Northern Irish Poetry

PETER McDONALD

in Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill

The name of William Butler Yeats means a number of different things in the discourses of contemporary Irish literary criticism, some of them a very long way from what might be understood by ... More

The name of William Butler Yeats means a number of different things in the discourses of contemporary Irish literary criticism, some of them a very long way from what might be understood by admiration. The recognition that the forms of poetry can have something to do with other aspects of its literary significance needs to be made by any intelligent critical writing; but a crude version of such an awareness, in which poetic form becomes simply a cypher for ideological content or historical placing, is a danger attendant on some of the more spirited and committed contributions to Irish critical debate on Yeats. The question of form in contemporary theory has a special relevance for Northern Irish poetry since the early 1960s. This chapter also looks at Yeats's critical quarrel with Northern Irish poets such as Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon.Less

Introduction: Our Proper Dark

Sinéad Garrigan Mattar

in Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival

This book examines the work of the first three directors of the Abbey Theatre — William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge — and in each case suggests the nature of their personal ... More

This book examines the work of the first three directors of the Abbey Theatre — William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge — and in each case suggests the nature of their personal primitivism and the extent to which it was influenced by comparative science. It discusses how critics ignored the existence of Celtology — the scientific, comparative study of Celtic culture, language, and literature that developed in the 1870s — and too often analysed the Celticism, and thus the primitivism, of the Irish Revival only in terms of the romantically primitivist tradition vocalised by both Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold. One of the reasons why the primitivism of the Irish Revival has as yet received scant attention is that a vital distinction between primitivism and ‘archaism’ has been smudged by its most eminent critics.Less

Publishing the Irish Cultural Revival, 1891–1922

Clare Hutton (ed.)

in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume V: The Irish Book in English, 1891-2000

This chapter examines the range of publishing possibilities available to authors in Ireland in the years between 1891 and 1922. It begins with an overview of market conditions that affected the ... More

This chapter examines the range of publishing possibilities available to authors in Ireland in the years between 1891 and 1922. It begins with an overview of market conditions that affected the development of Irish printing and publishing and compares them with those in Britain. It then considers the level of support given by British publishers to Irish authors, particularly William Butler Yeats and Douglas Hyde. It also analyses the revival of Irish publishing in Dublin which coincided with the cultural revival of the period.Less

‘He would put in allusions’: The Uses and Abuses of Revivalism

in Journey Westward: Joyce, Dubliners and the Literary Revival

This chapter analyses the allusive technique used by James Joyce in writing Dubliners. It identifies a number of previously unconsidered texts that lie submerged in the stories and considers what ... More

This chapter analyses the allusive technique used by James Joyce in writing Dubliners. It identifies a number of previously unconsidered texts that lie submerged in the stories and considers what they might tell us about Joyce's attitudes towards literary revival and to Ireland's tragic history. The chapter also highlights the phantom presence of several other authors in Dubliners including William Butler Yeats, Alfred Perceval Graves, William Rooney and Ethna Carbery.Less

Memory in the Literary Memoir

Jr. John Burt Foster

in The Memory Process: Neuroscientific and Humanistic Perspectives

This chapter considers a range of specimen passages, written in the early and mid-twentieth century, from memoirs by poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and by novelists Vladimir Nabokov and ... More

This chapter considers a range of specimen passages, written in the early and mid-twentieth century, from memoirs by poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and by novelists Vladimir Nabokov and Mary McCarthy. All three were gifted writers who became fascinated with memoir writing, not only to record a variety of vivid and important memories, but also to revisit and refine them later on. The literary memoir focuses with intensity on its author's capacity to remember, making it fertile ground for evaluating the nature and accuracy of long-term personal memory over periods of time that far exceed those of typical psychology experiments. The passages presented in this chapter raise questions about the outer limits of human memory and about its interaction, fusion, or confusion with creativity and imagination.Less

‘This terrible struggle with want of means’1: Behind the Scenes at the Cuala Press

Gifford Lewis

in The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume V: The Irish Book in English, 1891-2000

This chapter documents the early years of Cuala Press, described as ‘the most important private press in the history of printing in Ireland’. More specifically, it examines the problems and ... More

This chapter documents the early years of Cuala Press, described as ‘the most important private press in the history of printing in Ireland’. More specifically, it examines the problems and difficulties experienced by the company, especially under its director Elizabeth Yeats, sister of the poet William Butler Yeats. Cuala Press, for example, had to address the question of which manuscript hand, and typeface emulating it, was best suited to be the ‘national hand’ of Ireland. The chapter also looks at how Elizabeth increased diversification in Cuala Press’s ephemera, first by publishing a series of handwritten poems with illuminated initials. Finally, it discusses the impact of shortages and economic restrictions of World War I on Cuala Press, particularly in terms of its embroidery business.Less

Introduction

Sarah Cole

in At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland

Taking as its touchstone the passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when young Stephen Dedalus is beaten on the hands, the introduction establishes key principles for reading violence ... More

Taking as its touchstone the passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when young Stephen Dedalus is beaten on the hands, the introduction establishes key principles for reading violence in modernist literature: violence is imagined as the site of multiple origins and primary subjectivity; it is located in the body and at the crux of culture; it often begins as allegory (for instance by suggesting violence against humans through representations of violence against animals) yet it also collapses allegory into incarnation; most generally, the effort to find literary forms for violence stands at the very crux of literary self-definition. The introduction amplifies key terms in the book such as force and political violence, and develops two poles of historical thinking about violence in the period, the spectacular (where violence is hyperbolic and intensely visual, as in WWI) and the hidden (where violence remains mute and effaced). It also clarifies the book's relation to several important critical conventions about WWI and modernism, and provides brief chapter summaries.Less