Irish Revival Research Articles

"A Brown Study": Sterling Brown's Legacy of Compassionate Connections

“A Brown Study”: Sterling Brown’s Legacy of Compassionate Connections John F. Callahan (bio) 1 Struggling to write about Sterling Brown, his poetry and criticism, at first I could utter only half-remembered, half-invented fragments from the many conversations we had during the fifteen years I knew him and was his friend. Hearing Sterling’s voice so tinged with sorrow songs and trainwhistle blues, I thought of William Butler Yeats, whom Sterling loved for his music and his discovery and 20th century redirection of Irish folklore, and whose shivering, sinewy voice Sterling had heard on a recording from the 1930s. Some lines came into my head, and like the folks who drop in unexpextedly in Sterling’s poems, they lingered on the front porch of my mind: I sought a theme and sought for it in vain. I sought it daily for six weeks or so. So Yeats wrote of his writer’s travail of old age in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” before he realized that his theme was the heart. And not the heart of sentimental Valentine’s Day metaphors but the funky “foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” Ah, I thought, Sterling Brown’s true journey, like Yeats’s, was to the interior of his people and their tradition. There he found himself, and there he rooted his modernist poetry of the folk. Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. These lines are from Yeats’s epitaph, “Under Ben Bulben.” And as epitaph to Sterling Brown in the tenth year since his passing, I decided to write up the talk I gave on his 80th birthday at a festival put together by Michael Harper—the “Providence conductor” Fanny Ellison was fond of calling this poetic son of Sterling—at Brown University on May 1st, 1981. “Sterling Brown and the Irish Connection” was the name I gave it. And I wasn’t talking about Irish Americans, for like several African-American writers the connection Sterling made was back to Ireland. (Not to the black Irish either, [End Page 896] though he knew the phrase did not refer only to the black-haired, dark-eyed Irish, or to the melancoly, bitter brooding associated with a certain Irish temperament but also to the fact that from the time of the Spanish Armada stretching back before the Danish invasions, Moors had sailed to and been shipwrecked along the coasts of Ireland, especially off County Kerry in the Southwest where the Gulf Stream blows a warm plume of air past incongruous, thriving palm trees. Some of these Moors stayed behind and intermarried with Irish women.) Like Frederick Douglass before him, Sterling Brown found affinity with the soulful, stoical quality of Irish expression. When Douglass sought a point of contact with African-American slave songs, he found it in Irish music. “Nowhere,” he wrote in his old age, “outside of dear old Ireland, in the days of want and famine, have I heard sounds so mournful.” And surely Brown’s stubborn refusal over the years to accept the Harlem Renaissance as a name for the burst of energy in African-American letters during the 1920s and early 1930s had strong reference to the Irish tradition. Who would have thought to call the Irish Revival the Dublin Renaissance? Who but Joyce perhaps, and he was off enjoying his self-generated exile in Paris and Zurich. No, the roots Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge put down after sojourns in London and Paris, were in the folk country of the west, from the desolate moonscapeCounty Clare, to the suuden wild, green, fog-and-wind-obscured, sea-roaring Cliffs of Moher, up to Galway with its bleak, off-shore Aran Islands and their curraghs, north past Sligo to Ben Bulben, as much a mythical creature of Irish folklore as it is a mere mountain, finally to Donegal in the North and the likes of Bloody Head frothing away at the edge of the sea. One of Yeats’s most moving observations appears on the wall leading up the winding stair to his tower, Thoor Ballylee. There, on a...

The Woman of the Ballyhoura Hills: James Joyce and the Politics of Creativity

Irish Revival was in its ascendancy when James Joyce embarked on his career as a writer. And while there is increasing evidence that he had sympathy with movement's expression of revolutionary Irish politics and its attempt to recreate an Irish national culture,(1) his differences with specific positions and attitudes represented by proponents of Irish nationalism are dramatized throughout his writings. In A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man, Joyce addresses nationalist personification of Ireland as either an idealized woman (Mother Ireland or beautiful queen) or a degraded seductress (the woman who invites a stranger into her bed) by creating his own, resistant personification of Ireland in woman of Ballyhoura hills. This Irish peasant woman presents a brief though complexly realized figure of nation. In rendering her portrait, Joyce indicates his strong commitment to an esthetic practice grounded both in an Irish national identity, and in a progressive sexual politics. Joyce's version of national identity demands full consciousness as basis for a morality comprised of equal parts responsibility and desire, without bonds of repression or hypocrisy. Joyce, then, counters a stereotypical morality that would equate responsibility and repression. In Portrait, his Irish national artist models full consciousness in act of creativity. Readers might recognize Joyce's investment in connection between an artist's sexual experience and esthetics that would express a nation's identity emerging in a notebook Joyce kept in Trieste while revising Portrait. In one entry he expresses concern over prevalence of sexual repression in Irish culture: One effect of resurgence of Irish nation would be entry into field of Europe of Irish artist and thinker, a being without sexual education (Portrait 295). This entry records Joyce's belief that Irish writing will have a separate and particularly national identity and that it will have to compete in field of European thought. idea of a sexually inexperienced Irish artist concerns Joyce, and he counters this type through variety of sexual encounters Stephen Dedalus experiences. Through Stephen's sexual preoccupations Joyce associates sexual and intellectual expression. Esthetics, national politics, and sexuality are for Joyce mutually informing forces that Irish national literature must address. Mary Reynolds has pointed out that inception of Joyce's career was marked by his competition with more idealist writers of Irish Revival, and with Yeats and Synge specifically. substance of that competition was to be his rival representation of Irish nation. In The Day of Rabblement, Joyce writes that Irish Literary Theatre has succumbed to popular, unthinking nationalism of crowd and to the contagion of its fetishism and deliberate self-deception (Critical Writings 71). In The Holy Office, he rehearses his role in Irish art as a counter to idealism of his predecessors, a role that makes him the sewer of their clique. / That they may dream their dreamy dreams / I carry off their filthy streams (Critical Writings 151). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce takes direct aim at movement by calling it cultic twalette (344.12), a phrase that both parodies Yeats's book Celtic Twilight and names Joyce's role as sewer of an idealist movement.(2) In Portrait, his critique is more indirect. Resisting idealism of Revival, Portrait responds with a myriad of representations that express an ambivalent view of emerging nation. Several emblems of creativity preoccupy Stephen and, as I will argue, inform political dimension of his developing esthetic theory in fifth part of Portrait. first emblem is ambiguous image of a pregnant woman who stands in doorway of her lighted cottage inviting a stranger into her bed. second recalls Shelley's idea of a fading coal brought partially to light by an inconstant wind. …

Catholic Nationalism in the Irish Revival: A Study of Canon Sheehan, 1852-1913 by Ruth Fleischmann

Catholic Nationalism in the Irish Revival: A Study of Canon Sheehan, 1852-1913 by Ruth Fleischmann

Introduction: Locating Celtic Music (and Song)

All that emotion alone can do in the Celt has done; the very soul of emotion breathes in the Scotch and Irish airs; but with all this power of musical feeling, what has the Celt, so eager for emotion, that he has not patience for science, effected in to be compared with what the less emotional German, steadily developing his musical feeling with the science of a Sebastian Bach or a Beethoven, has effected? (Arnold 1910:87-88) Mas! elle est aussi condamnee ad disparaitre, cette emeraude des mers du couchant! Arthur ne reviendra pas de son ile enchantee, et Saint Patrice avait raison de dire ti Ossian: Les heros que tu pleures sont morts; peu vent-ils renaitre? (Renan 1947-64, vol. 11:253) We can smile at the antique rhetoric of nineteenth century enthusiasts, a rhetoric that linked Ossian and St. Patrick to King Arthur and a host of otherworldly characters who inhabit a magical, heroic past. Invoking the term Celtic, of course, has always been questionable because the concept is riddled with linguistic, cultural and ideological implications. If that is so, what might the much more specific notion of convey? Does such a thing exist, even as an abstract concept? Allowing for the moment that it does exist, even music in this context is not so simple, for in most European folk cultures the term signifies instrumental rather than vocal music. Music is often conceived in opposition to and this is no different in the handful of cultures with which we will be dealing here. The first issue, then-supposing that the concept of is a valid one-is its ambiguity of reference in comparison with song, which would presumably allude to songs in a language. Older rural concepts contrasted and song more readily than newer urban contexts, in which a healthy middle ground of song with instruments has developed, particularly since the eighteenth century. justifiably applies to such practice as much as to solo or concerted instrumental music. And music, as it is understood in today's urbanised world, can and does include song in usage. As a consequence, the second issue involves a widespread conception of which not only signifies different things to different peopleeven within the same country or culture area-but has an air of insubstantiality about it. Hence the locating as the title of this journal issue. But there is also the more complex issue of whether any made by indigenous musicians in a country with a living language can be called Celtic, whether classical or popular (e.g., Irish country-and-western). This issue has been raised elsewhere in regard to European folk as a whole and is significant simply because it defies neat cultural categories (Porter 1978). It lies, however, beyond the scope of the present discussion, which of necessity confines itself to that is traditional or is constructed in relation to a identity. The semiotic dimensions of the topic, and its conception both within and outside the communities which practise music, are problems that form the rationale for this issue of Western Folklore. THE CELTIC REVIVAL The idea of a Celtic music-whether it signifies bards, bodhrans, The Chieftains, Enya, Jest noz, triple harps, Riverdance, Alan Stivell, the Tartan Amoebas, or U2-is deeply and indelibly involved with the Revival in literature and the arts. For those who imprinted that Revival on public consciousness we should first look to the nineteenth century scholars who took it up: Matthew Arnold's views on literature, for example, are well enough known and have often been subject to scrutiny (e.g., Bromwich 1964, Durkacz 1983, Nutt 1910). Ernest Renan's La Po&ie des Races Celtiques (1854), which Arnold absorbed, is less well known but essentially involves the same aims and ideas. Renan and Arnold constructed a version of the world they derived from Ossian and from Herder's theories on poetry, thereby giving a substantial push to the Revival which is still in evidence today (Chapman 1978, Lang 1897). …

Dictionary of Celtic religion and culture

Containing more than 1000 articles, this dictionary is in effect a wide-ranging survey of important aspects of Celtic religion and culture, covering both the prehistoric continental Celts and the later medieval culture that found written form long after the Celts had settled in the British Isles. Articles in the book also cover the interaction between Celtic and Roman civilizations, and the seminal input of medieval Celtic legend into the Arthurian tradition. The continental and insular Celtic languages, both ancient and modern, are described, and there is an account of the Celtic deities known to us from the inscriptions and iconography of the classical world. Celtic art and agriculture, the Ossian myth, the Irish renaissance, and the history of Celtic studies, are among other topics studied in detail. Containing more than 1000 articles, this dictionary is in effect a wide-ranging survey of important aspects of Celtic religion and culture, covering both the prehistoric continental Celts and the later medieval culture that found written form long after the Celts had settled in the British Isles.

Nineteenth-century women poets: an Oxford anthology

Nineteenth-Century Women Poets is a major new anthology, turning a wide focus on a period which has traditionally had only its most eminent writers examined in any depth. Beginning with Anna Laetitia Barbauld's petition to William Wilberforce and ending with the myth-making Irish writers of the Celtic revival, this wide-ranging collection brings to light diverse female traditions that have for years remained in obscurity. While Nineteenth-Century Women Poets showcasts a host of female writers well-known in their day - Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti - it resists the narrow focus upon familiar middle-class authors taken by other anthologies of this period and contains works by working-class, colonial and political writers, in addition to the better-known names. The anthology draws on first editions for texts wherever possible, retaining the spelling and punctuation of the originals for a faithful representation. The chronological progression of the title highlights the development of women's verse from the late Romantic period through to the Victorian fin-de-siecle, examining the political formations and cultural groupings to which the women belonged, along with the structures which made the development of their work possible, in particular the numerous minority journals which allowed them a coherent voice. The collection also explores the thematic connections between different writers, through a consideration of common preoccupations with marriage, slavery, military conflict, national identity, and religious and sexual discourses, and reveals how styles and genres changed across the century.

Staging Ethnography: John M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World and the Problem of Cultural Translation

Much has been said about the role of folklore and legend in the various incarnations of the Irish National Theatre, but there is little discussion of how these indigenous materials come to be conscripted into dramatic productions and what this conscription tells us about Irish Revivalism generally. The Revival is usually understood to mean the group of writers surrounding W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge, and Lady Augusta Gregory who worked assiduously to restore and preserve the folk-cultural texts of the Gaelic-Irish peasantry. Revivalism as a cultural phenomenon (which encompasses historical, anthropological, and sociological discourses as well as literary ones) is so often characterized as a dramatic movement mainly because the early years of the National Theatre (1894-1916) are so strongly associated with the chief Revivalist writers, whose version of a national theatre was often rerouted through ostensibly non-political works.

Artful Books: Illustration in Irish Children's Books

Artful Books: Illustration in Irish Children’s Books Pat Donlon (bio) Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. No one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others. (John Ruskin) “In the beginning was the word.” For many Irish people it is difficult to accept that the opening of the Gospel of St. John was not written with Ireland specifically in mind. Much has been said about Ireland’s history and literature and now, as we face a new millennium, Irish writers have a confidence and a maturity born from a clear understanding of their place in the scheme of things, of their place in the great tradition of Irish writing. Irish poets, dramatists, novelists, and children’s writers continue to produce work which, though national in the narrow sense, belongs properly to the larger global community. But in discussions on Irish education and culture great emphasis continues to be placed on the role of the writer, with much less focus on the visual. To paraphrase Ruskin, we have yet to complete the manuscript of art and the art of the book. Part of that manuscript must be the evolution of illustration in children’s books and the role of illustrators in the developing and nurturing of a distinctive Irish identity. In the relatively short history of Irish children’s literature there have been two major motivating factors in the production of Irish books for Irish children. The first was the movement known as the Celtic Revival and the second was the period known in Ireland as “The Emergency.” The Celtic Revival was part of a larger cultural revival which was characterized by efforts to foster an Irish cultural identity through the [End Page 402] collection of folklore, the revival of the Irish language, and the attainment of an Irish Ireland through the renewal of interest in all things Irish. The second period of increased publishing activity, “The Emergency,” saw Ireland, at the time of the Second World War, declare its neutrality—an action which effectively resulted in a period of cultural isolation. That this isolation and introspection was not all negative, however, can be seen in the comments in 1950 of one critic: that our very isolation created here a feeling of individuality and self-confidence; or alternatively and perhaps simultaneously the very precariousness of our chosen isolation demonstrated even more strongly than involvement that we were part of modern Europe and not, as some would pretend, an exotic and miraculous survival from a Celtic Middle Ages. (Sheehy 45) During both of these periods there was an unprecedented level of publication for young people in both Irish and English. In 1893 Douglas Hyde, who was later to become Ireland’s first President, lamented that there were only six Irish-language books in print; in the same year Conradh na Gaeilge, the Gaelic League, was founded. Its main aims were the revival and preservation of the Irish language and traditional Irish culture. Over the succeeding decades the Irish government sought to promote publication in Irish and, most significantly in this regard, An Gúm, the publications branch of the Department of Education, was set up: it is today still foremost in this particular field. Between 1926 and 1964 it is estimated that An Gúm produced some 1,465 publications. Many of these were children’s books, some home-grown such as Máirín Ní Chriagáin’s Seán-Eoin (Old John), with illustrations by Jack B. Yeats, others hybrid, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in translation, with illustrations by Kathleen Verschoyle. In the 1970s An Gúm was again to play a critical role in the realm of children’s books and more specifically in the production of high quality picture and illustrated books. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Illustration by Lucas Rooney for Na Rudaí Beaga (Little Things), Daibhis (1919). The Celtic Revival period in the production of books in English is best exemplified by works such as Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, with...

Brian Friel: a casebook

This volume brings together thirteen essays interpreting the work of Ireland's most formidable puzzling playwright. Brian Friel's work has earned renown on both sides of the Atlantic, plays such as Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Translations, and Dancing Lugnasa have been box office hits still produced to large audiences. But both these popular plays other Friel works-including Freedom of the City, Volunteers, Molly Sweeney-have produced a variety of interpretations, evidence of the difficulty of defining Friel's art. Friel has been celebrated for his ability to capture feelings of loss emotional pain, as well as for his portraits of complex political historical conflicts. Because of his position as playwright of both the heart the social world, as tragic comic poet, as someone who connects the Irish Renaissance of Joyce, Gregory, Synge with the epistemological inquiries of post-modernism, Friel is an author who escapes easy classification Confinement freedom, politics the human spirit, suspicion beauty-Friel sets all of these oppositions in play. Friel greatest achievement, the one which will be intriguing audiences readers long into the future, may be his refusal to allow us to choose between these too easy alternatives, as he depicts language's dual potential to destroy or nourish. In a period in which cultural debate often divides people over just such lines, as humanism cultural studies become warring turfs, Friel stands out because of his demands that we rethink our own definitions of cultural authority. This volume of essays demonstrates-especially in the different readings provided of Dancing at Lughnasa-that Friel's plays provide windows into a wide range of studies of Irish culture: the volume includes what can be given the short-hand titles of literary, feminist, philosophical, political, historical analysis. The essays in the volume bring out different facets of this rich playwright. Index. Bibliography.

Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism, Masculinity and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884–1916

This article examines the highly gendered nature of the games of hurling and Gaelic football as propagated by the Gaelic Athletic Association from 1884 to 1916 and the relationship of these games to conceptions of nationalism, the body, anti‐colonialism, and memories of the Great Famine. Through the discourses surrounding these games, and other facets of the Irish renaissance, a nationalist conception of Irish masculinity emerged which distinguished Irish men from English men, Irish boys and Irish women. In this moment of self‐definition, nationalist goals were sought not in parliament or on the battlefield but on the playing fields.

W.B. Yeats: Endings and Beginnings: A Review Essay

W.B. YEATS: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS: A REVIEW ESSAY DECLAN KIBERD Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790, OUP, 1997. R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Volume I, The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914, OUP, 1997. W.B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats: Volume II 1896–1900, Ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey, OUP, 1997. “We were the last romantics—chose for theme Traditional sanctity and loveliness . . .” a poet’s beautiful lines may echo in the minds of his readers, rewriting themselves into the tradition of their very interpretation. Liberal analysts, beginning with Louis MacNeice (123–25), have often worried that Yeats’s poems seem to assert rather than to earn their chosen terms, and thus to invite disciples or detractors but few real critics. Criticism may properly allow us to admire this element, to reject that, and nevertheless arrive at a generally positive view of a great poet; but Yeats writes every other poem as if the only conditions for acknowledging its power are absolute (even prior) agreement with the sentiments it is about to deliver. If it is easy, it is not necessarily wise to take Yeats’s words for the true state of things. Despite the seductiveness of his view that we should believe any proposition until it has been categorically disproved, his is a program for the long-time postponement rather than the suspension of disbelief. The problem is this: The philosophers of the enlightenment had claimed that what cannot be proved doesn’t exist. And since a prejudice cannot be proven, the enlightenment liquidated all that did not have a strictly rational basis. W.B. YEATS: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS: A REVIEW ESSAY 183 It is now more than a quarter-century since Donald Davie—hardly the most politicized of critics—invited us to imagine how we should feel if, instead of “We Irish . . . thrown upon this filthy modern tide,” the poet had actually written “We Nazis”?1 The textual scruples to which this rather melodramatic moment gave rise in the critical literature of the subsequent decade were considerable. It was not long before Seamus Deane was pointing out that Yeats’s ideas of wisdom were established only in the texts, yet these ideas were the very precondition of our ability to decode the texts or make sense of them at all (“Heroic Styles” 45–60). “Pythagoras planned it”—but what? “I have met them at close of day”—who are “them”? In an utterly romantic solution to the problem of prejudice and tolerance, intimacy is assumed rather than being earned. The Yeatsian aesthetic is based on the proposition that to understand a text we must first align our readerly horizons with those of the author. Yet not even the most ardent admirer has ever managed to achieve an absolute overlap. Every reader, as much as every writer, is the product of a singular history and conscious of it as a subject. The reading of a text thus involves some sort of interpretation, for there can be no such thing as an unmediated experience. Each interpreter comes with a pre-understanding of the text, constituted of personal horizons that will be at variance with those of the greatest poet. The understanding of the text then becomes an event: Hans Georg Gadamer argues that we use a poem to test those preunderstandings while allowing it to evoke questions to which we do not as yet have answers (417 ff). In the best sense, the encounter may be dialogic , calling upon readers to examine their own prejudices and tolerances even as they interrogate the poet’s. Yeats’s poetry remains a fascinating test-case because of its power to insinuate its accompanying argument into the mind of the most resisting sort of reader. No critique of Yeats written in the past generation has been as subtle or ferocious as that of Seamus Deane, yet even he ends up recycling the “last romantics” thesis in his most compelling essay. In “Yeats and the Idea of Revolution,” Deane remarks that “Yeats had no idea or attitude which was not part of the late-Romantic stock-in-trade” (Celtic Revivals...

Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s

1. Walter Pater and the French Connection 2. The Holy Writ of Beauty 3. The Rage for the Past and the Celtic Twilight 4. Decadent P(r)ose 5. The Rhymers' Club and Other Poets 6. Literary Periodicals 7. The Legacy of the 1890s.

W.B. Yeats: a literary life

Preface - Acknowledgements - Chronology: Yeats's Life and Contemporary Events - Introduction - Family and Place - Yeats and the 1890s: Celtic Twilight and Golden Dawn - Yeats and Politics - Yeats and the Theatre: 'Baptism of the Gutter' - Friends and Loves - Masks and Development - A Vision of Byzantium - Yeats and Modern Poetry - Notes - Selected Bibliography - Index

Portraits of Irish Patriots by Oliver Sheppard, 1865–1941

PORTRAITS OF IRISH PATRIOTS BY OLIVER SHEPPARD, 1865–1941 JOHN TURPIN irish political life in the early twentieth century saw immense changes. As manifested by the cultural revival and by political and revolutionary movements, Irish national self-assertion had an impact on the sculpture of the period. In a series of seven portrait busts, made between 1904 and 1939, Oliver Sheppard portrayed some of the key Wgures in Irish life. This series of patriotic portrait busts is a memorial and testimony to certain Irishmen who were participants in that change, either as thinkers or men of action . Oliver Sheppard (1865–1941) was born in Dublin where he attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art from 1884 to 1888 and attended, on scholarship, the National Art Training School, South Kensington, London , from 1888 to 1891. He completed his education in Paris and returned to England to teach modeling in Leicester and Nottingham. During the late 1890s Sheppard sent work back regularly to Ireland for exhibition and, Wnally, in 1902 he returned permanently as teacher of modeling to his former school. He became one of Ireland’s best-known sculptors and received many commissions, especially in the years before World War I. He was the principal sculptor to draw inspiration from the Irish Revival. From the mid-nineteenth century on, two of the most important movements which inXuenced the tradition of Irish nationalism were the Young Ireland movement, with its call for separate cultural identity, and the Fenian movement, with its call for establishing an Irish republic by violent means. John O’Leary (1830–1907) was one of the links between the Fenian movement and the new revolutionary tendencies of the early twentieth century.1 O’Leary had been editor of the Irish People, a Dublin Fenian journal. For PORTRAITS OF IRISH PATRIOTS BY OLIVER SHEPPARD, 1865–1941 134 1 For a biographical note on Sheppard and all the portrait subjects, see Henry Boylan, A Dictionary of Irish Biography (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978), and also Jeanne Sheehy, The Rediscovery of Ireland’s Past: The Celtic Revival 1830–1930 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), pp. 183–84. his revolutionary opinions he was condemned to twenty years imprisonment but was released after nine years and banished. He lived in Paris and, eventually, returned to Ireland in 1885. O’Leary’s contact with the young and impressionable W. B. Yeats provided an important impetus for the literary revival. In his poem “To John O’Leary,” Yeats had written: “Because you loved the nobler part / Of Erin; so we bring you here / Words such as once the Nation’s heart / On patriotic lips rejoiced to hear.” O’Leary’s importance was recognized by Hugh Lane, who commissioned John Butler Yeats, the poet’s father, to paint a portrait of him as one of a series of portraits of prominent Irishmen, and this was completed in 1904. Perhaps inXuenced by W. B. Yeats, Sheppard came to know O’Leary and decided to model a bust of him; it does not appear to have been commissioned . Writing in 1937, a journalist recorded that “John O’Leary who was [Sheppard’s] intimate friend sat for him, and on completion of the Wgure presented him with books and pamphlets of his, namely ‘Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism’ [1896] and ‘What Irishmen Should Know’ [1886], aVectionately autographed.”2 Sheppard was an active member of the Gaelic Society at the School of Art. Largely inspired by cultural arguments , Sheppard was committed to Irish self-determination, and O’Leary’s cultured literary sense of Ireland’s historic destiny would have appealed to him. On May 19, 1903, O’Leary wrote to Sheppard from 17 Temple Street, Dublin, saying that he would “be happy to sit for [him],” but that there were problems about time and “the state of [his] health.” Sitting began in May and continued in August and November. The portrait bust was probably completed in a plaster cast by early 1904; on January 11, 1905, O’Leary complained: “You seem to have forgotten all about that copy of my bust. I hope however, to see it sometime sooner or later.”3 The plaster cast was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian...

An Interview with Seamus Deane: University College, Dublin, June 1993

Seamus Deane was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and has recently resigned Dympna Callaghan his position as Professor of English and American Literature at University College, Dublin. He has published three collections of poetry, Gradual Wars (1972), Rumours (1977), and History Lessons (1983). Celtic Revivals is among best known of his widely published critical writing on English, French, and Irish literature.' He is a prominent member of cultural activist group, Field Day, founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in 1980. Field Day produces a play each year, as well as a pamphlet series, of which influential Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, edited by Deane, is best known to U.S. readers.2 Deane is also general editor of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, the most comprehensive anthology of Irish writing ever published.3 He has recently taken up a new post at Center for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame.

Myth and Identity in Joyce's Fiction: Disentangling the Image

Literary Revival of turn-of-the-century Dublin was much concerned with expressing Irish aspirations through heroes. Finn and Cuchullain supplied imaginatively what Ireland had not been able to achieve reality: an Irish hero who vanquished all foes. Joyce's contempt for this form of self-consolation is well documented. In his broadside The Holy Office he parodies Yeats as he declares that he, Joyce, must not accounted be/One of that mumming company. Stephen of Stephen Hero devotes much energy to debunking Revival. What is perhaps less well known is that Joyce's initial contempt gave way to a profound understanding of psychology of Revival and of uses of myth creation of identity. latter is theme of Portrait, and, indeed, it is theme of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as well. Joyce's realization, or disentangling (to use Stephen's word), of this theme came about as he rewrote Stephen Hero into Portrait of Artist as a Young Man. In his earliest attempt at self-portraiture, an essay entitled A Portrait of Artist, Joyce portrays his young self as a contrary kind of hero, one who, rather than embodying aspirations of culture, defies cultural pressures and stands alone. He contrasts himself with young nationalists who in their relations among themselves and towards their superiors . . . displayed a nervous . . . and a very English liberalism (61-62), who respond with enthusiasm to poetry of Thomas Davis, and to whom the memory of [Terence] McManus [an advocate of anti-English violence] was hardly less revered than that of Cardinal (62). Cullen had discouraged aggressive nationalism and, as Archbishop of Dublin, had forbade a funeral ceremony for McManus to be held any church his diocese (62n.). In this early attempt at self-definition it is Catholic nationalists who provide a position of popular error against which Joyce is able to figure himself as lone hero. young artist, contrast to these self-contradictory peers, seeks high ground: Let pack of enmities come tumbling after him and sniffing to highlands after their game; there was his ground: and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers. (61) In segment of Stephen Hero which has survived, Joyce adds Celtic Revival notions of Douglas Hyde to this erroneous orthodoxy. Stephen's pronouncements on subject are frequent and often quite heated. He argues about it with Madden, a character modeled upon Joyce's university friend George Clancy: [Madden:] - But really our peasant has nothing to gain from English literature. * Rubbish! * Modern at least. You yourself are always railing . . . * English is medium of Continent. * We want an Irish Ireland. * It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it Irish. * I do not entirely agree with your modern notions. We want to have nothing of this English civilization. * But civilization of which you speak is not English - it is Aryan. modern notions are not English; they point way of Aryan civilization. * You want our peasants to ape gross materialism of Yorkshire peasant? * One would imagine country was inhabited by cherubim. Damme if I see much difference peasants: they all seem to me as like one another as a peascod is like another peascod. Yorkshireman is perhaps better fed. (54) Clancy was both an active member of Hyde's Gaelic League and a friend of Michael Cusack, to whom he introduced Joyce. Richard Ellmann quotes an 1884 article of Cusack's which deplores effects of foreign and hostile forces and pernicious influence of hated and hitherto dominant race (61). So Madden is expressing kind of furious nationalism that formed a conspicuous part of intellectual climate of turn-of-the-century Dublin. …

The Fairy Bride Legend in Wales

ON a recent visit to a Cardiff bookshop specialising in Welsh publications, the writer of the present article counted eleven different published versions of the story of the fairy from Llyn Y Fan Fach. The tale, which first appeared in print in the nineteenth century, tells the story of a fairy woman from the depths of Llyn y Fan Fach in Carmarthenshire who married a mortal. She returned to her supernatural realm when her husband violated conditions she herself had laid down, but her children became the famous doctor-magicians, the Physicians of Myddfai.' The published versions, both Welsh and English, currently gracing the shelves of the bookshop at the time of this little ad hoc field exercise all contained suitably romantic illustrations ' la Arthur Rackham. The tale has become firmly fixed in the canon of 'Welsh folktales'. Somehow it seems so typically Welsh with its otherworld fairy bride, poignant sense of lost love, and its doctor-magician sons. Very few printed collections of 'Welsh Folktales' are without it, which presents the interesting situation, in regards to the variant associated with Llyn Y Fan Fach, of a Welsh tale having to be translated back into its original language.2 Print is of course the important word. The Llyn y Fan Fach story appeared in 1861 in the introduction to The Physicians of Myddfai which contained a translation of the medical texts associated with this family and an introduction containing a long, printed English version of the tale.3 This is the first time this story of an otherworld bride was attached to the quite genuine, but presumably independent, traditions and medieval medical texts associated with this family of famous physicians.4 The printed version is long, and rather over-written. The lake lady's hair 'flows gracefully in ringlets over her shoulders ... whilst the glassy surface of her watery couch served for the purpose of a mirror'. The sun 'gilds with its rays the peaks of the Fan' and the young man vainly 'strains his eyeballs' over the lake looking for the 'enchanting vision'.5 Although the elements of the tale are probably genuine and were collected by the Welsh publisher and antiquary William Rees, native of Tonn, which is not far from Llyn Y Fan Fach, the version is given here in English. Once again the Celtic Twilight seems about to cast its roseate and distorting glow on the folklore itself. Fortunately Llyn y Fan Fach is not the only source for information about the Welsh Lake Lady. About three dozen variants of the tale dating from the tenth to the twentieth century are known, and the very fact that the tale has attained such a curious, almost icon-like status, tells us much about perceptions of Welsh tradition in and outside Wales. The study of folklore is not simply a matter of disentangling the purely oral from the literary and fictitious. The strands intertwine, and despite the comparatively small numbers, the Welsh versions of the Otherworld Bride allow us to chart the development of the tale in a changing cultural context. The tale is part of a widely distributed supernatural legend tradition in which an otherworld woman marries a mortal, but eventually returns to her world leaving him and their children. The tale is widespread, particularly in northern and western European countries where the woman is sometimes in animal form and the loss and recovery of her animal skin motivate her marriage and return. Sometimes she

"We Were Never on the Scene of the Crime": Eavan Boland's Repossession of History

From Yeats and the Celtic Revival onward, Irish poets have recorded, shaped, and criticized their nation's emerging independent identity. In the process, of course, they also attempted to reforge links to the past by creating for Ireland a literary incorporating the myths, folklore, and symbols of a long-suppressed Gaelic heritage. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, the literary wished into existence by Yeats has been expanded, modified, complicated, and virtually completed: it has become, so the argument goes, a given in Irish literature, a dead issue. Thus in Modern Irish Poetry, Robert Garratt assumes a change among a younger generation of writers in their attitude toward tradition (5). For today's poets, Garratt argues, the need to create and establish a in literature no longer appears foremost in their thoughts (5); contemporary poets no longer feel compelled to write the definitions and apologetics that so obsessed their poetic forefathers. Although Garratt does not use the word, forefathers is by implication a key concept in his formulation; the Garratt traces (from Yeats to Heaney) is exclusively male. For women, who until recently have appeared only as subjects and objects of poems, not as their authors, the matter of carries considerably more urgency than it does for their male counterparts. Indeed, just as the early Revivalists

Irish government policy and political development of the Gaeltacht

Abstract The paper deals initially with the historical background to the Irish revival effort, stressing in particular the over‐optimistic evaluation of the extent of the Gaeltacht (Irish‐speaking) communities by the Irish state, which came about largely due to the inspiration of the language restoration movement. It traces the broad development of official attitudes since the 1920s, both towards the Gaeltacht and towards the language effort itself, stressing the need to reform the Udaras na Gaeltachta (The Gaeltacht Authority) structures in a local government context and in view of the new integrated regional development approach of the E.E.C. It also deals with current issues which are seen as crucial to the language, including the development of Irish‐language television, the status of Irish within the E.E.C. and the need to restore the enumeration of Irish speakers in the U.K. census of 1991, as no questions on the language have been included in census returns from the Six Counties of Northern Ireland...

The Sequel to "The Irish Renaissance"

The Sequel to "The Irish Renaissance"