Abstract
This essay discusses the three poems that Yeats titled with dates, ‘September 1913’, ‘Easter 1916’, and ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, in the context of ongoing centenary commemorations of the period of Irish decolonization. It does so by juxtaposing the historical function of dating and commemorating with the virtual possibility of encounters that never quite happened, establishing a trajectory through Yeats's poems that runs from James Connolly's not meeting Rosa Luxemburg to Paul Celan's commemoration of her murder in the 1919 Spartacist uprising in a poem from the late volume Schneepart. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's reading of Celan and the date, the essay uses this constellation of possibilities to reflect on the stakes of a commemoration that entertains possibility rather than closing off the past.
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