‘Ireland is the True Subject for the Irish’: Yeats's Early Nationalist Overstatement

Abstract

‘Ireland is the True Subject for the Irish’: Yeats’s Early Nationalist Overstatement Dylan Thursfield Yeats’ declaration that ‘Ireland is the true subject for the Irish’ is extremely bold, limiting ‘Irish’ literature to an almost singular concern. But what does Yeats mean by this alarming statement? – and does it stand up to scrutiny? Firstly, we must establish a specifically early-Yeatsian definition of ‘Ireland’. To do this, I turn to his 1898 essay, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, and his 1899 essay, ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’. These two works offer a manifesto-like outline of what he considered essential characteristics of ‘Irish’ literature during his early nationalist phase. After establishing this definition, I examine whether it holds throughout a cross-section of Yeats’s own poetic canon. I begin by studying two poems from The Rose: ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, and the 1892/5 variants of ‘The Sorrow of Love’. Following this, I investigate how his poetic treatment of ‘Ireland’, and its relation to mythology in his texts, evolved over time by analysing the 1925 version of ‘The Sorrow of Love’. Finally, I illustrate how Yeats had poetic concerns beyond the narrow constraints of ‘Ireland’ by probing the personal interests of ‘Politics’, and the occultist inflections in ‘The Second Coming’. ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ ponders restatement of Matthew Arnold’s belief that Celts have a ‘passion for nature, […] imaginativeness, [and] melancholy’, before claiming: ‘The Celtic passion for nature comes almost more from a sense of her “mystery” than of her “beauty”’ and it adds ‘charm and magic’ to nature, and the Celtic imaginativeness and melancholy are alike ‘a passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact’. The Celt is not melancholy as Faust or Werther are melancholy, from ‘a perfectly definitive motive’, but because of something about him ‘unaccountable, defiant, and titanic’.1 This subtly turns Arnold’s postDarwinian classification of Celtic peoples as a lesser race upon itself.2 They are presented as having the ability to defamiliarise readers’ experiences of ‘nature’ by endowing it with a ‘natural magic’ that is ‘the ancient religion of the world’3 – a ‘magic […] forgotten’by Keats, Shakespeare, and Virgil, who Dylan Thursfield Studies • volume 109 • number 436 414 ‘Look at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant’.4 By insisting there is a ‘forgotten’, ‘ancient’ alternative to the ‘Greek way’ of viewing the world,5 this text seeks to establish a potentially pre-Hellenic basis for ‘Ireland[’s]’ history and views: a different, yet equally ‘valid’, way of life to that favoured by the English and classical peoples. Early-Yeats’s ‘Ireland’ is concerned with nature, (pre-)Hellenic in its origins, and opposed to the dominant trains of thought in England’s literary culture. ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’ reiterates and deepens the above by stating that ‘a new kind of romance, a new element in thought’ is being ‘moulded out of Irish life and traditions’.6 Reading this statement in conjunction with Yeats’s interest in French Symbolism (arguably a precursor to literary modernism)7 underscores how this text locates Ireland at the forefront of literary development. These claims towards the avant-garde are married with the apparent ‘Romantic’ and ‘classical’ power of Ireland’s old poetry, which contains ‘the clouds of evening and dawn, that became in Homer’s mind the memory and prophecy of all the sorrows that have beset and shall beset the journey of beauty in the world […] [and] the spirit of Helen’.8 The image and metamorphoses of ‘the clouds of evening and dawn’ are drenched in (post-) Romantic notes evoking Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ and Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’. By asserting that these antique ‘clouds’ are present in Ireland’s ‘ancient’ poetry, the work suggests Ireland is innately classical and coloured by Romantic ‘beauty’; yet, perhaps puzzlingly, she also ‘has in her […] the forms in which the imagination of Europe uttered itself before Greece shaped the tumult of legend into her music’.9 Early-Yeats’s ‘Ireland’ is: concomitantly classical and pre...