The Blueshirt Episode and its Background

Abstract

It is well known that Yeats was associated for a time with the Blueshirts, an Irish political movement which was at least superficially fascist, and which Yeats believed was fundamentally fascist. There are good reasons for not considering this episode especially significant. First, it was contemporaneous with other extravagant episodes — the Steinach operation, the collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami, the sponsorship of Margot Ruddock — the meaning of which seems to lie in their very extravagance, in their keeping with Yeats’s wish, expressed in a poem of the time, to avoid ‘all that makes a wise old man’ that he might seem a ‘foolish, passionate man’.1 Second, the episode lasted less than a year, and Yeats ended by publicly dissociating himself from the movement. Third, the Blueshirts themselves enjoyed only a ‘brief period of vigour’, according to one of their founders,2 their main accomplishment being their ‘adding colour to the drabness of life in the 1930s’, as historian John Murphy has wittily noted.3 Since, however, Yeats was perhaps the greatest poet of his time, and fascism perhaps the most potent political force between the wars, so potent as to loom in our arguments and nightmares down to the present day, the episode is bound to interest us and provoke us to speculation.