Roadways of Fire: Cosmopolitan Critics and Modern Gas Lighting in W. B. Yeats’s John Sherman (1891)

Abstract

This article argues that W. B. Yeats uses his early novel John Sherman (1891) to identify and interrogate a non-national model of poetry he newly conceived to be global in its significance. Previously Yeats had attacked Ireland's ‘West Britons’ for seeking to emulate the Anglocentric critical standards set by Matthew Arnold, and so ignoring the beauty and truths of their supposedly provincial homeland. Such art of the ‘critical’ rather than ‘creative imagination’, as typified for Yeats by the minor English poet William Watson, is dramatized in the overaestheticized meditations of the character William Howard from John Sherman. As Howard's ruminations on the Irish landscape proceed, however, his critical spirit develops from the cautious, Anglocentric anti-nativism of Watson's Arnoldian ‘scholar poet’ into the iconoclasm of Oscar Wilde's critic-artist. More radical in his intellectual ambitions and truly extra-national in his affiliations, Howard is galvanized to adopt this new, cosmopolitan attitude by the dispersed forces of technological modernization that had reached Ireland's western seaboard. In reaction to the all-pervasive urban lighting that stimulates Howard's worldly reflections, Yeats's gaze turns inward in the novel's poetic counterpart, seeking to locate the grounds of the Irish creative imagination in the occult dark of Innisfree.