Yeats's Political Identities: Selected Essays (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Yeats’s Political Identities: Selected Essays Michael North Yeats’s Political Identities: Selected Essays. Edited by Jonathan Allison. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Pp. ix + 352. $47.50. “Yeats has many political identities,” as Jonathan Allison observes in the introduction to this new selection of essays. There is the leftist Yeats who hung around William Morris, the Irish revolutionist who followed O’Leary, the polemicist of the Irish Literary Revival who was inspired by Maud Gonne, the Irish Senator and singer of the Anglo-Irish swan-song who was a distant admirer of Mussolini. And there are, as Allison also observes, the many different Yeatsian identities that live in the readings of his detractors and defenders. Of all these, Allison has chosen to focus on a relative handful. There is little, beyond the celebrated Conor Cruise O’Brien indictment and a selection from Elizabeth Butler Cullingford’s book-length exoneration, on Yeats and fascism. There is even less on Yeats’s early days in the Revival. Instead, the focus returns again and again to the years between 1916 and 1922, between the Easter Rising and the advent of the Irish Free State, and to those poems, most notably “Easter 1916” and the poems about the Civil War, that remain as unsettled as the political issues they commemorate. Attention is focussed on this period and this particular political identity by the large number of essays drawn from or inspired by the “revisionist” strain in Irish writing about Yeats, writing that is suspicious of the grandiloquent gesture in Irish politics and even more suspicious of poetry, like Yeats’s, that seeks an affinity, however uneasy, with such gestures. The real purpose of the selection, then, is to document a particular debate going on in Ireland, a debate begun in the pamphlets of the Field Day Theatre Company and the pages of the Crane Bag and carried to massive fruition in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing and the Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies. It is the editor’s hope that bringing together the various sides of that debate will “stimulate further discussion” (22), not only about Yeats himself but about the role he has come to play in Irish controversy. One side in the current controversy is represented by Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, and Richard Kearney, who are accused by one of their antagonists later in the anthology of mounting [End Page 163] “what has almost seemed a kind of cultural crusade” against Yeats’s influence (286). Another antagonistic contribution denounces these same critics as a “misbegotten and intolerant . . . de-Yeatsification cabal,” which bases its criticisms “upon political bias rather than aesthetic judgment” (293). These defenses, especially that of David Krause, for whom Yeats is a “noble stag” eluding the “pack of hounds” and an eagle soaring beyond them, are so heated that the reader working his way sequentially through the volume may go back to the contributions of Deane, Kiberd, and Kearney, convinced that he has missed something. For these essays seem notable primarily for their mildness. Two of them, Kiberd’s revised “Inventing Irelands” and Kearney’s “Myth and Terror,” actually have little to do with Yeats at all. And Deane’s “Yeats and the Idea of Revolution,” one of the first essays to appear in the Crane Bag, actually seeks to distinguish Yeats’s racial theories from those of fascism and to find points of contact between Yeats’s politics and the sort of revolutionary politics Deane himself tends to favor. Reading the key essays that seem to have inspired this anthology, one looks in vain for the “icily angered analysis” (287) that Terence Brown ascribes to Deane, his chosen antagonist. There is certainly nothing in the current version of “Inventing Irelands” to match Kiberd’s splendidly unfair charge, quoted in Brown’s essay, that Yeats helped turn Ireland into “a kind of tourist’s film set” (286). In short, the so-called “revisionist” position has been rather briefly and tepidly represented. The three writers already named have each written critiques more forceful than those excerpted here, and other Crane Bag contributors, not included here at all, have also produced influentially revisionary books...