Symbolism at the Periphery: Yeats, Maeterlinck, and Cultural Nationalism

Abstract

Modernism has been one of the most contested categories of literary history. Over the last two decades, reputations have been challenged, ideologies have been questioned, and the very concept of an English has given way to views that stress the importance of national contexts in the relation that modernist texts bear to history. It has become increasingly difficult to speak of English as though it were a British or Anglo-Saxon category that includes names which were usually lumped together: Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Yeats, etc.1 Irish literature scholars in particular have been keen to reclaim Yeats and Joyce as part of a distinctively Irish version of modernism, sometimes analyzing their works through postcolonial theory.2 The postcolonial challenge and the devolutionary process that affect the canon of English-speaking strike at the very root of what was originally meant by the term: indeed, cosmopolitanism and internationalism were long supposed to be hallmarks of modernism. Those qualities have not been completely discarded, but their nature and scope have been re-examined in the light of modernist writers' involvement in the cultural politics of specific nations. One aspect of modernist internationalism, however, clearly continues to operate unchanged in most readings. The impact of French has featured in most definitions of English-speaking in discussions of modern poetry in English, the terms symbolism and modernism are often virtually synonymous.3 Edmund Wilsons ground-breaking study, ^x£fr Castle, set the tone as early as 1931, even before the term 'modernist' was applied to the writers Wilson discusses. According to him, it was only possible to make sense of Yeats, Eliot, Joyce or Stein by considering their debts to the symbolist school that developed around Stephane