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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the plan of Y. B. Yeats's poem, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, which is the focus of this book. It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to give an account of the way plan and structure meet and clash in the poem, of the tunes they make, and of the ways in which the whole formation connects to the historical world.

Seeking refuge in marriage to George Hyde‐Lees posed a potentially lethal threat to Yeats's poetic enterprise. Because the essence of the courtly love poem was its praise of an unattainable woman, marriage and sexual satisfaction threatened to cut off the source of inspiration. Yeats found his way out of the inspirational impasse, but this time it took what he described as ‘something very like a miraculous intervention.’ To relieve her husband's post‐marriage gloom, George feigned automatic writing, but then, she maintained, a superior force took over. The fascinated Yeats pressed her into five years of intensive communication with the unknown spirits. George's Pythia‐like exchanges with the spirits answered the question whether sexual success would still the voice of the Muse. Au contraire, they said, ‘What is important is that the desire of the medium and her desire for your desire be satisfied’ because ‘there cannot be intellectual desire…without sexual & emotional satisfaction’ and ‘without intellectual desire there is no force — or truth especially truth because truth is intensity.’ In other words, whereas sexual fulfillment was inconsistent with the courtly lover's access to inspiration, it was the sine qua non of revelation from George's instructors. Chapter 5 situates the automatic writing and its product, the extraordinary philosophical, historical and aesthetic essay, A Vision, in the context of Yeats's pursuit of the Muse, and examines the way in which the great poems of his maturity reflect the influence of George Yeats as oracle and Muse.

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.

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.

This chapter examines the early debates over the need for an Irish national theatre. It suggests that the crisis surrounding the Parnellite split of 1890 and death of C. S. Parnell in 1891 was key. In the 1880s, melodrama written by Hubert O'Grady and J. W. Whitbread resonated with Nationalist optimism: its continued popularity should be associated with Irish Parliamentary Party momentum. However, the complexity of 1890s divisions saw a Parnellite minority adopt a notionally ‘modern’ wave of literary experiment led by Yeats, and analysed by Shaw. Ibsen was also an important touchstone. Newspapers like United Ireland became forums for cultural political debate also manifest in the emergence of the National Literary Society (1892) and the Gaelic League (1893). Such debates were alert both to the cultural dimension of politics and to the social complexity of an Ireland that had begun to consider issues of class and gender.

This chapter examines the cultural-political allegiances from the centenary of the 1798 rising to the founding of the Irish National Theatre Society. During 1899-1901, the Irish Literary Theatre led by W. B. Yeats, Edward Martyn, and George Moore lived out its influential span. Tracking political circumstances, it is argued that while the ILT began life in debt to the constructive Unionism of Horace Plunkett and the Daily Express, the polarising influence of the Boer War took it into more nationalist territory. Although publications such as Moran's the Leader kept sectarian fires lit, the influence of socialist thinkers Connolly and Ryan on Arthur Griffith mitigated the United Irishman's nationalist conservatism (and anti-Semitism) long enough for an embrace of the theatre movement. This seemed confirmed when the ILT collapsed, to be followed by the INTS in 1902 and its fabled production of Cathleen ni Houlihan.

This chapter examines the fracture of the theatre movement and cultural nationalist alliances in the post-Boer period. Yeats, with financial backing from Annie Horniman, was able to set up the INTS in the Abbey Theatre and establish the organisation as a professional company. Cultural nationalists, particularly Griffith and Moran, attacked the theatre for rejecting propagandist imperatives; however, their attack on Synge reveals a conservative nationalist agenda also evident in their anti-Semitic support for the Limerick Pogrom of 1903. Beyond the apparent oppositions, however, a ‘union of Sceptics’, often in left-literati combinations, operated to suggest alternatives. Journals such as Dana, the Nationist, and the National Democrat; theatre groups such as the Theatre of Ireland and the Ulster Literary Theatre; and the range of material available at the Abbey from Colum, Boyle and Lady Gregory demonstrate a broad spectrum of opinion.

This chapter considers closely the debut of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World and the ensuing ‘riots’. It emphasises Synge's radical credentials and argues that Synge's Playboy was a calculated provocation. With the greatest offence deferred until the final act, the riot is considered as Synge's intention, producing an avant-garde event rather than simply a play. The following controversy, including Yeats's decision of the theatre to reinforce the play's run with police presence and prosecutions, is understood as polarising opinion. However, the division was not as absolute as has previously been portrayed; northern republicans in the Dungannon Clubs found the issue petty; language campaigners found it irrelevant; and some, such as George Roberts and Tom Koehler, recognised Synge as a writer that might revivify Irish parochialism with the irreverence of nascent European modernism.

This chapter reassesses the role of the theatre in pre-Revolutionary Ireland. Considering Yeats's ‘Man and the Echo’, it argues that the theatre was central to the Irish revival. Parnellism provided an important opening for cultural nationalism because it looked forward to ripening opinion rather than established consensus. Nationalism contained conflicts along lines of class, gender, and generation, all revealed in theatre as much as in the activities of Irish Socialist and Feminists; and the regional development of theatre in Cork and Ulster is emphasised. The model of Ireland as lost to tribal opposition is rejected; left-literati alliances were indicators of resistance to bourgeois nationalist imperatives. Republicanism proved open to such modernist lessons, but while Synge is presented as influentially provocative, his creative anxiety should not be reduced to revolutionary provocation alone.

The relationship between the study of classical culture and the formation of empire is well established. This chapter traces alternate spaces of engagement within the decolonizing public sphere in Ireland. It focuses on a range of twentieth‐century writers, including James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Louis MacNeice, Michael Longley, and Seamus Heaney. Specific focus is given to the ways in which contemporary events, including independence, partition and state formation, have been represented through images of the ancient past in a form of vernacular classicism. Ideas of literary and political language, from the epic to the republic, took revolutionary form in the modernist works of Joyce and Yeats. For the subsequent generations of MacNeice, Longley, and Heaney, the classical world has allowed culture to engage with, and question, the violent legacies of colonization.

Having rescued the epic muse from the usages of the novel, heroic myth declined towards the fin de siècle into a Victorian museum collectible. The characteristic form for epic after 1870 became the anthology of tales, organized by deep, reflexive belief in civilized progress. Classical antiquity (Lewis Morris), Ireland and the South Seas (de Vere, Ferguson, Domett), the world's religions (Owen Meredith, Edwin Arnold), natural history and English history too (Blind, Palgrave) — all found place in epics whose plots were folded into the meta-narrative of a progressive evolution that had produced imperial modernity as its crowning vantage. Against this escalation of claims greater poets of the day, Morris and Swinburne, pitched their epic dissent, maintaining in plots of singular catastrophe tragedy's resistance to assimilation by the Gilded Age, and stubbornly enshrining the scandal of tragic joy where the newcomer Yeats might recruit it for fresh political purposes. The epic logic of eclectic retrospect meanwhile bred a scholarly subgenre in comprehensive, multi-volumed literary, national, and anthropological histories.

This lecture traces W. B. Yeats' preoccupation with the changing forms of death throughout his life, from his fin-de-siécle love-poetry to his poems of death. These poems of death were linked to his interest in Celtic legend, Irish intellectual influences and conjunctions, and magical ritual and psychic research. The lecture considers Yeats' approach to death in his later work, concluding with his creation of a structured canon of work in the light of his own death and the work that he wrote on his deathbed.

This concluding chapter reviews the discussions of the previous chapters, looking at the conservationist ethnic movements that challenged the idea of common national cultures in the United States and the United Kingdom. It determines that Matthew Arnold and William Dean Howells's writings contain the resources for the renegotiation of the conception of ‘culture’ found in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and W. B. Yeats.