The “North” in Yeats’s Cultural Imagination

Abstract

The paper explores the nature of Yeats’s relationship with the “North.” Yeats’s radical dissociation of the Ascendency from the Irish middle classes, as well as his earlier justification of cultural nationalism as the rightful substitution for the incompetent and divisive Irish politics after the Parnell fiasco, originated from his compulsion to (re)invent himself. By constantly recalling and referring to the disdainful collusion of the Irish Catholic church with the basely complacent middle classes, Yeats buttressed his claim for the centrality of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy as the cultural backbone of Irish nationhood. This, however, leaves unanswered the question of Ulster Protestants that constituted the most powerful middle-class assemblage in the Ireland of Yeats’s time. Yeats didn’t leave a sustained account of his view of and relationship with the North, all extant documents of relevance being piecemeal. It is necessary to piece together references to the North found in Yeats’s occasional writings, diary entries, anecdotes and public speeches to create a narrative of the North in his cultural imagination. By focusing on Yeats’s childhood experience of Ulster Unionism in Sligo, his attitude toward the Ulster Literary Theatre, his poems about the Irish Civil War and his Senate speeches, the paper aims to construct a coherent account of Yeats’s fraught relationship with the North.