Maud Gonne Research Articles

Analyzing W.B. Yeats Selected Poetry Through Feminist Epistemology: A Reassessment

W.B. Yeats stands out as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. His symbolic poetry and his political and philosophical ideas are all prominently reflected in his work. During his lifetime, he was deeply influenced by a few remarkable women who made significant contributions to his poetic development and played a pivotal role in shaping his personality. Yeats's poems chosen for this study offer a profound insight into the predicament of women within various socio-cultural and economic contexts. This analysis will explore how Yeats projected female voices through multiple images and symbols in poems such as 'A Prayer for My Daughter,' 'Among School Children,' and 'Leda and the Swan.' While Maud Gonne is widely recognized as a central figure in Yeats's love poems, it's essential to acknowledge that she wasn't the sole woman who influenced the artist's evolution. Others, like Lady Gregory, Olivia Shakespeare, and George Hyde-Lees, the wife of W.B. Yeats, played significant roles in the later phase of his life, particularly in developing his philosophical treatise, "A Vision." In his final poems, Yeats attempted to convey his ultimate understanding of love, emphasizing its perfection in the unbroken relationship between the body and the mind. Works like 'Among School Children,' 'Leda and the Swan,' 'The Second Coming,' 'Sailing to Byzantium,' 'A Man Young and Old,' and many other universally acclaimed poems were inspired by his complex relationships with Maud Gonne and others.

An Activist’s Spiritual Experience: Maud Gonne’s “Spirit World” in her Autobiography and Letters to Yeats

Spirituality and the occult represent important aspects of Maud Gonne’s life and writings, and their investigation offers an unusual perspective on this famous icon of revolutionary Ireland. Her memoir and letters to Yeats testify to a lasting relationship with “the spirit world” in as diverse forms as Celtic mysticism, occult practices, psychic phenomena, and the Catholic faith. By investigating her syncretic spirituality and the role this dimension played in her political activism, this contribution intends to expand our understanding of Gonne as an autobiographer; while the written self could “lose all sense of proportion” (Gonne, Yeats 1993, 238) the writer of the self carefully arranged episodes and memories into a plot, the story of a Bildung and of a life’s mission.

Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille

Reviewed by: Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille Caroline Summers Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment. By Tom Zille. London: IMLR Research. 2021. xiii+221 pp. £25. ISBN 978–0–85457–273–1. This first monograph from Tom Zille explores the extensive translation output and literary influence of the Enlightenment writer Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804). It is the first published volume in English on Weiße's work, and it offers a detailed study of his contribution to Anglo-German relations and translation culture in a period that saw the emergence of professional translation and the modern book trade, along with 'the accelerating evolution of the German literary idiom' (p. 7). Zille delivers a carefully researched microhistory, with a focus on substantial analysis of Weiße's unpublished correspondence that generates much to interest book historians, translation scholars, and modern translators. The study is not primarily concerned with theoretical approaches, but Germany's complex intercultural relationships with its European neighbours are explored through a broad focus on the question of cultural transfer. This is a concept that has made some inroads in Translation Studies, including recent work not mentioned by Zille such as Maud Gonne, Klaartje Merrigan, Reine Meylaerts, and Heleen van Gerwen's Transfer Thinking in Translation Studies: Playing with the Black Box of Cultural Transfer (Leuven: Leuven University Press 2020). Weiße's correspondence reveals the complex interests that shape intercultural mediation and offers insights into the newly marketized field of literary translation, for example through his criticism of the 'Raubsucht der Übersetzer' (p. 31) who take great liberties with their texts or demonstrate limited knowledge of the source language. Some space is given to scrutiny of Weiße's own translations, allowing an illustration of his developing translation strategy. Zille explores how Weiße negotiated contemporary debates on translation, navigating binaries of stylistic accuracy versus target-language fluency or equivalent effect versus literalness that continue to preoccupy the field. While Translation Studies scholars may find themselves frustrated by a lack of theoretical context and the seeming self-evidence of comments on the 'success' (or otherwise) of Weiße's translation choices, such textual analysis allows an exploration of the blurred boundaries of the role of the translator, looking at the intersections between Weiße's translation and his original writing to show how translation might shape target-language usage. It is in the two chapters on networks and agency that Weiße's literary entrepreneurship is most compellingly presented. The correspondence reveals a powerful network of cultural influence, and in places the book reads like a Who's Who of eighteenth-century German literature (although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is conspicuously absent). However, while Weiße enjoyed some illustrious connections, the letters also record the precarity of his various and intersecting roles as translator, writer, publisher, editor, commentator, educator, and literary advocate. The variety of texts he translated reflects an ongoing struggle to reconcile literary prestige with commercial viability, a dilemma that may be just as familiar to literary translators in the present day. The result is a robust portrait of a flesh-and-blood [End Page 273] translator, for whom translation is both a creative endeavour and a material necessity. This is a carefully researched and vivid account of eighteenth-century German culture that reveals the power and position of translators within a developing ecosystem of literary professionalism and intercultural relations. It would have been enriched by fuller engagement with the wider Translation Studies context: Zille acknowledges his focus specifically on translation debates contemporary to Weiße, but it is surprising that there is no nod even towards ideas about foreignization (Friedrich Schleiermacher) or Weltliteratur (Goethe) that would begin to circulate in Germany almost immediately after Weiße's death, or to the ongoing discourse on both these issues that continues to characterize debates in Translation Studies and beyond. There is also certainly more to be said about how Weiße's work maps onto established and more recent theories of translator agency and networks. However, what emerges powerfully from the study is...

Literary Communication: Rethinking Love and Divinity in Some Select Texts

The world of literature embodies rich experience of Love and Divinity. It is an ever-changing perspective, highlighting different contours of writers’ engagement across the world who has dealt with the stated themes with great candour. This paper attempts to draw insights from John Keats, Eliot, Yeats and a regional writer Kanheilal Das to project a balanced view of love and divinity. John Keats is an English Romantic poet whose verse is known for its vivid imagery and great sensuous appeal. His beloved Fanny Brown remained engaged in love until Keats’ untimely death. Keats’ letters embody commonest of human passion. He wrote, “You have absorbed me. I could be martyred for my religion i.e, Love. Similar echo is found in Charlotte Bronte, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Leo Tolstoy and others. Like John Donne, Andrew Marvel is not in the least romantically concerned with his beloved. Later B Teats and Maud Gonne liked each other but they were not in love. When W B Yeats says, ‘Love is false or true, it reflects the uncertainty of love-making’. Kanheilal too lives in his stories, filled with intense quest and longing. His love real or elusive is still illuminative. The stories are like window shutter through which they see the pathetic poignancy of their emotions of love. The paper examines the primordial emotion of love, divinity and its aberrations/manifestations in the proposed texts.

“I had grown wild”: A Critical Reading of Yeats’s Journey towards His ‘Final Mood’

W. B. Yeats had a long poetic career which is marked by three different moods expressed through his poetry. His journey towards the ‘final mood’ has passed through the early years of escapism, romanticism and a trace of pre-Raphaelite influence. Yeats began as a late romantic with his bent towards Irish tradition and folklore. But he soon moved from the dreamland of fairy tales and reached a world of life and reality. With the influence of French symbolism, his conception of beauty and poetry evolved further. The nostalgic yearning for the good, old days landed the poet in a mood of despondency and pensive thoughts. Yeats’s frustrating experience with Maud Gonne and his disillusionment with the prevailing Irish customs led him towards self-introspection. Naturally, his choice of themes became more realistic. The spectacle of war in both Ireland and Europe presented before Yeats a broad canvas of violence and destruction which reflected in his philosophical overtones and mastered imagery throughout his poems especially of the Middle Era. Like a true tragic hero, Yeats’s journey is from darkness to light and from suffering to the joy hidden in its bosom. The painting of gross destruction is left behind and the poetic theme became the gaiety of the sages. Yeats discovered significant meaning of life even through its trivial happenings. He unleashed the beautiful and lofty through individual experiences which are of real value. In his Last Poems the poet’s deeper understanding of human nature elevates him to a person with a rare kind of vision. The poetic joy of this visionary poet is more pronounced than then tone of despondency, desolation and loneliness expressed in his early poems.

At the intersection of medievalism, Celticism and nationalism: Maud Gonne as “Ireland’s Joan of Arc”

ABSTRACT The Celtic legend of a woman destined to free Ireland and the resonances of this myth with the story of Joan of Arc was intentionally and calculatedly employed by Maud Gonne and her supporters. Gonne understood the powerful underpinnings of the story of Joan of Arc, drawing on them to form a powerful persona that still permeates popular memory around Gonne to this day. An in-depth study of the title of “Ireland’s Joan of Arc” reveals new insight into Gonne’s motivations and her influences, and into the interconnectedness of medievalism, Celticism and nationalism in Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

윌리엄 버틀러 예이츠의 「회색바위」 : 시인의 실연과 극복

윌리엄 버틀러 예이츠의 「회색바위」 : 시인의 실연과 극복

The Flesh Made Word and the Word Made Place: Thomas McGreevy's ‘Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill’

The Flesh Made Word and the Word Made Place: Thomas McGreevy’s ‘Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill’ Thomas O’Grady ‘Then Mount Jerome for the protestants’, James Joyce has Leopold Bloom muse in the ‘Hades’ episode of Ulysses: ‘Funerals all over the world everywhereeveryminute.Shovellingthemunderbythecartloaddoublequick. Thousands every hour’.1 Bloom is not in Mount Jerome but in the National Cemetery in Glasnevin, the ultimate setting for ‘Hades’ and the final resting place of his recently deceased friend, the fictional Paddy Dignam. It is also the final resting place for another of Joyce’s fictional creations, May Goulding Dedalus, wife of Simon (who has a cameo role in the episode) and mother of Bloom’s co-protagonist for the novel in its entirety, Stephen Dedalus (whom Bloom catches a glimpse of through the window of the funeral carriage as it passes along Sandymount Road). In 1904 Glasnevin was also the final place of rest for the real-life Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, among many other Irish luminaries; eventually it would hold a pantheon of Irish literary, historical and cultural figures ranging from Michael Collins, Maud Gonne and Éamon de Valera to Brendan Behan and balladeer Luke Kelly of The Dubliners. It would also hold both of Joyce’s parents (the models for Simon and May Dedalus) and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Even Seumas O’Kelly, the author of the classic short story ‘The Weaver’s Grave’, set in the unnamed but still recognisable old cemetery in his native Loughrea, Co. Galway, is buried in Glasnevin, ironically (for anyone acquainted with that story) in a nondescript grave shared with a relative. Located on the other side of Dublin in the southside village of Harold’s Cross, Mount Jerome Cemetery was indeed, in 1904, a principal burial ground for Protestants, including such notable literary and cultural figures as Thomas Davis, John Kells Ingram, William Carleton, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; musicologist Edward Bunting, painter Walter Osborne and William Studies • volume 109 • number 434 191 Wilde, father of Oscar. Over time they would be joined by the mortal remains of John Millington Synge, George Russell (A E), and Jack B Yeats. In 1920, the gates of Mount Jerome were opened to Catholics, and eventually the pantheon there, too, expanded to become richly constellated, including even celebrated Irish-language authors Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Máirtín Ó Direáin. Another of those Catholics, interred upon his death in 1967, is Thomas McGreevy.2 A man of many parts – literary critic, art critic and historian, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963, best man at the wedding of James Joyce’s son Giorgio in 1930, executor of the will of Joyce himself in 1941, close friend of Samuel Beckett as well as of George Yeats (W B’s wife), even closer friend of Jack B Yeats (on whom he wrote a monograph), executor of J B’s will in 1957 – McGreevy was also a noteworthy poet. Indeed, his slight output notwithstanding – one thin volume, titled simply Poems, published in 1934, and a few strays afterwards – he is always included among the small number of Irish writers directly associated with poetic modernism: Niall Montgomery, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin. ‘Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill’ While that single volume yields a number of enduring poems, arguably the most enduring of all is ‘Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill’. In fact, by the evidence of a letter to McGreevy from George Yeats, the poem not only met with her approval but also received the imprimatur of W B himself. ‘My dear Tom’, George wrote on 26 March 1926, ‘You never yet did anything as good or better than “Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill”’: ‘I’ve read it again and again and there isnt [sic] a word to spare or a misplaced word and I take my hat off to you. Willy has been away yesterday and today so he hasnt [sic] seen it but I’ll be very surprised if he doesnt [sic] get it at least as much as I’ve got it. I’ll show it to him tomorrow and write to you again! I felt quite grateful to you for it . . . ’ Two pages later, she...

예이츠의 사랑의 시: 잃은 여인과 얻은 시

Yeats’s unrequited love for Maud Gonne was the inspiration for many of his best love poems. He recognized that the imagination dwells the most upon a woman won rather than a woman lost. If Maud Gonne had accepted his proposal, she would not have filled his days with misery. Without misery, however, there would be no poems. What Yeats had been after must have been poems rather than a woman’s love. It was Yeats who installed her as the unattainable and would be happy to make his beautiful poetry out of their spiritual union. For love poems, as in Yeats’s work, the woman should remain unattainable as an ideal love.

‘Cast a Cold Eye’: Life and Death in W. B. Yeats's Poetry

ABSTRACTAcclaimed as one of the best poets of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats is often the focus of critical attention. The connections between Yeats's work and the Abbey Theatre, Irish nationalism, language arts, and his love affair with Maud Gonne have been widely explored. Many of Yeats's poems focus on death, a universal topic which engenders fear and enchantment simultaneously, so his attitude toward the inevitability of decrepitude merits further exploration. This paper discusses Yeats's early poems, such as ‘When You Are Old’ and ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’ as well as his later poems, such as ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ and ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul.’ These poems are analysed in a comparative study of Yeats's conception of life and death. Additionally, Derrida's deconstructive reading strategy and his creative interpretation of death expounded in The Gift of Death (1996) are included to trace the elusive nature of death in Yeats's poetry and illustrate its personal and cultural implications. It was found that whereas in his earlier poems the hierarchical opposition of life and death is strategically subverted to help resolve his unrequited love affair, Yeats deals with death with energy and confidence in his later poems.

Rabindranath Tagore’s India and William Butler Yeats’s Ireland: The Intersection of Classical Languages, Literature, and Nation-Building in Postcolonial East and West

Although largely unrelated phenomena, there are striking similarities between the manner in which both Ireland and India drew upon their classical languages as a mechanism for intellectual nation-building upon both states’ withdrawals from the British Empire. After examining this overarching content, the development of a national literary canon is analyzed through the framework of the relationship between the leading literary figures of both nations in the run-up to independence: W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore. Yeats’ early admiration for Tagore is contrasted with his later disillusionment and demonstrated to be part of his misconception of India as representing an idealized past which Ireland had already surpassed. Though both he and Tagore were critical of the nationalist narratives of their own states — particularly nationalist violence — Yeats’ views were clouded by his relationship with Maud Gonne, while Tagore feared Asian attempts to transform into colonial powers on the model of the West.

예이츠와 박목월의 비현실성

Park Mok-wol and Yeats have a common point as a poet of unreality. They had spent their boyhood in a kind of dream world—Yeats in Sligo, which was a poor fishing village of Ireland and Mokwol in Kyungjoo, which was a historical town of Silla Kingdom. They spent their early years in beautiful local valley, water, sea shore, woods and were fallen in dreamy imagination. We can say both of them had a fantasies which made them to look at the reality as if in a violet dream. Many readers like to read “The Lake isle of Innisfree” as expressing Yeats’s longing for a paradise. Park also made similar paradise in his early poems. He dreamed a beautiful hills and valley which has beautiful woods, a clean spring, small temple and pretty female roe. Their longing could also be found in their love poems. Yeats loved Maud Gonne for 30 years; Park loved a woman and eloped with her to a faraway island. Their love was really unrealistic affair which made them to create good poems. But their love was different on one point: Yeats could love Maud Gonne openly, but Park could not reveal an identity of the woman he loved because of the Confucian morality of Korean society.

‘Unremarkable, Forgotten, Cast Adrift’: Feminist Revolutions in Irish Visual Culture

This creative essay examines how visual culture and Alice Milligan’s re-animation of the Tableaux as a radical form of theatre practice operated as a link between ideas of national culture and revolutionary feminism in Ireland. But the tableaux had other elective affinities too. Theatre, photography and the magic lantern were the most immediately obvious of these; but cinema and art installation are by now also recognizably among them. The moving cinematic image is in fact a series of still pictures which give the effect of movement. As silent films became more popular in Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century they were called ‘living pictures’, the name also used to describe tableaux. But even in the era of the early silent film, directors often suspended action to jolt the viewer into another interpretative realm. We see this in Griffith’s 1909 film A Corner in Wheat — where a shot of a bread queue looks like the film has stopped. Early photography was vital to Alice Milligan’s practice: she raised funds for the first magic lantern for the Gaelic League (first used in Donegal); travelled the country taking photographs of people and sites; projected glass slides as part of community tableaux shows; and Maud Gonne’s early play Dawn uses 3 of her tableaux. During the 1897 royal visit to Dublin, James Connolly, Milligan and Maud Gonne used a magic lantern to project onto Dublin’s city walls photographs of famine that they had witnessed in the west of Ireland.

Sound Effects in a Studio by Aidan Mathews (review)

representations of her in sculpture, paintings and stained glass and commemorations to her in the liturgy and in prayers. Various forms of her name, especially Brighid, Bríd, Brigid, Bridget have been popular for girls and an order of nuns, the Brigidines, was founded in her honour. In folklore she is venerated as the ‘Mary of the Gael’and even as foster-mother of Jesus. Her cult was widely established by Irish missionaries and emigrants on the continent of Europe from the seventh to the ninth century, and similarly, in recent centuries, in America, Africa and Australia. Since the mid-twentieth century the cult of St Brigid has declined, except with regard to the popular St Brigid’s Cross. Parents do not name their daughters after her as frequently as heretofore and the folk-tradition surrounding her is dying out. Somewhat ironically, St Brigid has been adopted as an icon by feminists who admire her achievements in a patriarchal society. Thus they echo Maud Gonne and Inghínidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), who promoted her as a model for women at the beginning of the twentieth century. While the monograph is a valuable contribution to the historiography on St Brigid, it does not provide a satisfactory answer to those who doubt that she was a real person. Fr J Anthony Gaughan is a retired parish priest in the Archdiocese of Dublin and the author of numerous historical writings. Sound Effects in a Studio, Aidan Mathews (Cork: Southword Editions, 2017). In his biography Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan recounts meeting a guy who used to provide sound effects for radio shows. ‘I asked him . . . how he got the sound of the electric chair and he said it was bacon sizzling. What about broken bones? The guy took out a LifeSaver [mint] and crushed it between his teeth’. Dylan reflects, ‘I was raised on that stuff, used to quiver with excitement listening to these shows.’ In the poem, ‘Sound Effects in a Studio’,Aidan Mathews reveals how these associated sounds startle the imagination into accepting that what is being signified is real. In one particular scene of transformation, his eighteenth century heroine, ‘in a tank top and warm leggings under a denim skirt’, could Studies • volume 107 • number 426 250 Summer 2018: Book Reviews be a Greek station porter who is called Kurios Metaphor. ‘So let one thing stand for another’, the poet invites, our ordinary human lives laying claim on some deeper reality: ‘You breathing through a blocked nose now/ A breeze on the face of the deep, / My silence the only word for it’. ‘Francis of Assisi’, with its great opening line –‘Francis of Assisi is my bi-polar saint’ – takes an unconventional slant. Here the saint is interrogated as to gender clarification for ‘my manic depression’, this ‘neutered thing’ requiring for respite ‘the little vanillas of tranquillity’. ‘Is it Sister Stalker or Brother Trauma?’ ‘The wolf came to you with his hang-dog tail’, he appeals, ‘why not the werewolf?’ The poem reads as a howl against the frightening land of altered reality as the poet-child remembers being sent back to bed: ‘Stop the nonsense…though the stairs were melting in the sweat of my four feet on walkabout’. Mathews is a poet of the incarnational, our fleshy existence mapped for its floodplains and wetlands. For him there is no line of separation between body-blood and soul-divinity. Indeed, much of his writing carries the subtext that there is a surcharge of meaning in the nature of existence, for ‘the social lepers…damaged and ageing… are as human as God’(‘Healing the Lepers’). This short collection begins with the poem, ‘After Omagh’ – ‘It was where you turn at the meat-processing plant’ – the ferocity of the explosion, when it registers, silencing the impatient horn-blowing of those stuck in a trafficsnarl . His audacious pun, ‘The rest is sirens…’, captures all that cannot be said nor made amenable to speech beyond the sign language at pains to break the news on the News for the Deaf. A wry humour is never far away. Mathews’penchant for self-deprecation is one expression of it: ‘I walked our...

Action as narration/narration as action: reading Maud Gonne’s auto/biographical writings as marginalized knowledges of the historiographical operation

Feminist historians have long argued that women have been absent from history, and recovering their position in the historical discourse has been one of the main projects of academic feminism for the last 40 years. But while women’s marginal position as historical subjects has been recognized and addressed their actual contribution to the historiographical operation is still a grey area that needs further research and exploration. Narratives are at the heart of how women have attempted to write history and it is this marginalized area that I address in this paper by focusing on Maud Gonne’s controversial autobiography, Servant of the Queen, as well as on moments of her correspondence with her life-long friend William Butler Yeats. Gonne’s auto/biographical narratives are read as discursive effects of fierce power relations at play, but are also theorized as recorded processes wherein Gonne as the author of her political story emerges from the margins of knowledge production and actively inserts herself in the discourses of Irish history.

City Profile: Sligo, Ireland

W hen I pulled into Sligo on the morning bus with a dog-eared copy of W. B. Yeats’s Collected Poems, I carried two wishes: first, that it would stop raining. And second, that I might uncover some of the vital, inspiring force behind my favorite poet. One gets over the rain. Located on the coastal edge of County Sligo in the northwest of Ireland, Sligo rests on the neck of land between Sligo Bay and the placid Lough Gill. Riverside restaurants, shops, and lively pubs line the town center, where the swinging doors of little cafés disclose the smell of black currant scones or the flash of jam jars and bottles of cordial. Visitors’ maps lead to abbeys, churches, and other historical sites around town, but somehow, people seem to gravitate toward Wine Street, where the Yeats Memorial Building stands. Lovers of Irish poetry have good reason to venture to a less-trafficked town like Sligo. Yeats’s early work draws deeply from the natural features and fairy stories of the area where he spent much of his youth, and his footprints linger. With a car, a bicycle, or a sturdy pair of walking boots, one can retrace the journey of “The Stolen Child” through the deciduous canopy of old Slishwood to the rustling waterfall of Glen-Car, where the fairies swing from fern fronds. Bus and ferry can bring you to the famous lake isle of Innisfree that hummed peacefully in Yeats’s memory amid the bustle of London, or to the Salley Gardens where he would rendezvous with Maud Gonne, ever aloof. The more solemn-minded make their way to the cemetery where Yeats lies interred “Under bare Ben Bulben’s head / In Drumcliff churchyard” and ruminate on the lines cut into his simple headstone. Despite the area’s many draws, travelers from too far afield are regarded as something of a pleasant surprise. Tours are more likely to be filled with visitors from another county than curious continentals or pond-hopping Americans. Let slip a foreign accent and you may find yourself caught up in a chat with a lifelong resident. Should your dialogue take a turn toward poetry, you may discover one of Sligo’s greatest charms: here, literature never quite becomes history. Sligo is a place of poetry without pomp. Verse is scrawled on the walls, written into folk songs, and etched into the memories of those raised with rhymes on their tongues. Yeats’s legacy is borne proudly and revisited frequently. One exemplar of this (and for me, one of the town’s great treasures) is the Hamilton Gallery, which, in addition to exhibiting artwork from a vast range of contemporary Irish artists, holds an annual invitational exhibition reflecting on some aspect of Yeats’s work. Each of these special shows is a culmination of the unique kind of presence with which Sligo is gifted—one that allows its inhabitants, and perhaps its pilgrims, to poignantly reenvision the life and work of W. B. Yeats. Grant Schatzman is a WLT intern and a writer, editor, and student at the University of Oklahoma. Notebook city profile Sligo, Ireland by Grant Schatzman LEFT PHOTO: DAVE GUNN. RIGHT PHOTO: KEITH EWING left Sligo’s River Garavogue. right Yeats’s grave in St. Columba’s churchyard. WORLDLIT.ORG 5 ...

City Profile: Sligo, Ireland

W hen I pulled into Sligo on the morning bus with a dog-eared copy of W. B. Yeats’s Collected Poems, I carried two wishes: first, that it would stop raining. And second, that I might uncover some of the vital, inspiring force behind my favorite poet. One gets over the rain. Located on the coastal edge of County Sligo in the northwest of Ireland, Sligo rests on the neck of land between Sligo Bay and the placid Lough Gill. Riverside restaurants, shops, and lively pubs line the town center, where the swinging doors of little cafés disclose the smell of black currant scones or the flash of jam jars and bottles of cordial. Visitors’ maps lead to abbeys, churches, and other historical sites around town, but somehow, people seem to gravitate toward Wine Street, where the Yeats Memorial Building stands. Lovers of Irish poetry have good reason to venture to a less-trafficked town like Sligo. Yeats’s early work draws deeply from the natural features and fairy stories of the area where he spent much of his youth, and his footprints linger. With a car, a bicycle, or a sturdy pair of walking boots, one can retrace the journey of “The Stolen Child” through the deciduous canopy of old Slishwood to the rustling waterfall of Glen-Car, where the fairies swing from fern fronds. Bus and ferry can bring you to the famous lake isle of Innisfree that hummed peacefully in Yeats’s memory amid the bustle of London, or to the Salley Gardens where he would rendezvous with Maud Gonne, ever aloof. The more solemn-minded make their way to the cemetery where Yeats lies interred “Under bare Ben Bulben’s head / In Drumcliff churchyard” and ruminate on the lines cut into his simple headstone. Despite the area’s many draws, travelers from too far afield are regarded as something of a pleasant surprise. Tours are more likely to be filled with visitors from another county than curious continentals or pond-hopping Americans. Let slip a foreign accent and you may find yourself caught up in a chat with a lifelong resident. Should your dialogue take a turn toward poetry, you may discover one of Sligo’s greatest charms: here, literature never quite becomes history. Sligo is a place of poetry without pomp. Verse is scrawled on the walls, written into folk songs, and etched into the memories of those raised with rhymes on their tongues. Yeats’s legacy is borne proudly and revisited frequently. One exemplar of this (and for me, one of the town’s great treasures) is the Hamilton Gallery, which, in addition to exhibiting artwork from a vast range of contemporary Irish artists, holds an annual invitational exhibition reflecting on some aspect of Yeats’s work. Each of these special shows is a culmination of the unique kind of presence with which Sligo is gifted—one that allows its inhabitants, and perhaps its pilgrims, to poignantly reenvision the life and work of W. B. Yeats. Grant Schatzman is a WLT intern and a writer, editor, and student at the University of Oklahoma. Notebook city profile Sligo, Ireland by Grant Schatzman LEFT PHOTO: DAVE GUNN. RIGHT PHOTO: KEITH EWING left Sligo’s River Garavogue. right Yeats’s grave in St. Columba’s churchyard. WORLDLIT.ORG 5 ...

Self-Reflection in Yeats’s Mythic Method

Many modernists, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and W. B. Yeats, make frequent use of the term “myth” in their works because they want to objectify their ideal and subjective individuality by using a mythic method. Another reason why they depend on myths is that modernism emphasizes tradition in addition to modernity. Modernists accept E. H. Carr’s view of history that “History is the dialogue between the past and the present.” In case of Yeats, he adopted the Celtic myth as materials of his dramatic and narrative poems. He extracted stories from Ulster and Fenian cycles because they all dealt with heroes who fell in love. Through adopting these stories, Yeats wanted to create a pure and romantic Ireland and inspire Celtic nationalism. However, besides this purpose, in his works such as “The Wanderings of Oisin,” “The Old Age of Queen Maeve,” “Baile and Aillinn,” and “The Two Kings,” Yeats tried to reflect his own story, especially his unrequited love with Maud Gonne by revising Celtic myths. Thus, Yeats tried to juxtapose his own love story with the love story of his heroes in myths.

Ireland’s Decade of Conflict 1913–23 (IV)

Studies • volume 106 • number 422 221 Ireland’s Decade of Conflict 1913–23 (IV) Sean Brophy Women and the independence movement The narrative of events in the movement to Irish independence is largely concerned with men: poets, soldiers and politicians. This is odd, given that the Fenian manifesto of 1867 and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 espoused gender equality. Moreover, despite the fact that women over thirty only got the right to vote in 1918, many women participated in all phases of the movement. In its cultural phase, the so-called Irish Revival, we encounter the pioneering contribution of the writer and historian Emily Lawless. She wrote on the famines of 1846 and 1847 and the social conditions of rural Ireland in the run up to the first Home Rule Bill. It is arguable that her rhetoric and forensic attention to detail made more impact on William Gladstone than had Daniel O’Connell in his day on Robert Peel. She uses the idea of a Famine road to capture images of a county inspector in Galway picking up 150 bodies of families who had just lain down and died on a single stretch of road. Her prose is heartbreaking: Think of the separate hell gone through by each individual father and mother of all that starving multitude. And when all hope was over, that end that must have been so welcome, because there were none left to live for, think of the lying down to watch the vanishing away of this familiar green landscape in the last grey mists of death.1 Lady Gregory and Maud Gonne Lady Augusta Gregory was another major figure in the Irish Literary Revival who was determined to show her compatriots how they could find their own voice and shed their mask of what O’Connell might have described as cowering people, acting their part as quarrelsome, vulgar, rollicking buffoons to entertain their imperial masters. Her most notable contributions were her play Cathleen Ní Houlihan, first produced in collaboration with WB Yeats in 1902, and the foundation of the Abbey Theatre in 1905. Gregory blended ideas from the United Irishmen of 1798, the Fenians of Ireland’s Decade of Conflict 1913–23 (IV) 222 Studies • volume 106 • number 422 1867 and a non-materialist Celtic spirituality in her play, an allegory in which Ireland features as an old woman, who inspires heroic male figures. The first production, with Maud Gonne as the old woman, was a great success. Gonne herself had founded Inighinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) in 1900 to raise the consciousness and cultural ideals of young women towards complete independence of Ireland. As early as 1902 we see that the seeds of revolution were being sown by her and Lady Gregory. Cathleen Ní Houlihan represents the Irish nation. The character Michael questions her about what hope she has to hold on to and she replies, ‘The hope of getting my beautiful fields back again: the hope of putting the strangers out of my house’. How will she do that? Michael, who epitomises the young men who will eventually fight in the failed Rising of 1916 and what followed, asked. The Old Woman speaks of ‘the good friends who will help me’. Now she must go to meet them. ‘I will go with you’, Michael says.2 Kathleen Lynn Almost 100 women served alongside the men during the Easter Rising, in medical, catering and military roles. Some went on to participate in the political phase that followed. Kathleen Lynn, for example, was active in the women’s suffrage movement and the 1913 labour troubles. She was chief medical officer to the Irish CitizenArmy at the time of the Rising and secondin -command to Sean Connolly of the garrison in City Hall. She took over command after he was shot and led her volunteers until they were ordered to surrender. After the Rising she was jailed in England and, on her return home, became vice-president of the executive of Sinn Féin and was elected a Sinn Féin TD in 1923 but did not take her seat because of her opposition to the Treaty. Aside from politics, she...

The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats by Adrian Frazier

Reviewed by: The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats by Adrian Frazier Anthony Bradley The Adulterous Muse: Maud Gonne, Lucien Millevoye and W. B. Yeats, by Adrian Frazier , pp. 312. Dublin: Lilliput Press. 2016. €20 (paper). Anyone who has read the poems of W. B. Yeats, or knows anything about his life, knows that he fell in love with Maud Gonne, the beautiful Irish nationalist, when he was a young man; proposed marriage to her several times over the course of almost thirty years; that she did not requite his passion; and that Yeats wrote some of the finest love poems in the language, ranging from the adulatory and mythologizing to the accusing and embittered: "Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery. …" The conjunction of sexual desire and political nationalism in her person was typically transmuted in Yeats's poetry into a powerful erotic nationalism, so that even when a poem (such as "Easter, 1916,") appears self-evidently to be about something else, in Frazier's compelling and persuasive reading, it is really all about Gonne. The Adulterous Muse is a highly readable and even sensational book, replete with political imbroglios and sexual intrigue, well paced and expert in its narration, and impressive in its lightly worn scholarship. Frazier has tapped into French archives that feature fascinating newspaper and magazine articles about Gonne and her adulterous lover, Lucien Millevoye, in 1890s Paris. Of the three main players, we presumably know most about Yeats, thanks especially to R. F. Foster's biography, but by focusing on his relationship with Gonne (offering illuminating and original readings of Yeats's poems about her), Frazier manages to shed new light on his artistic and emotional life. Maud Gonne has remained a more opaque figure, despite her autobiography A Servant of the Queen (1938), and several biographies. Whether she is admirable or not depends on your leanings in Irish politics—yet even one sympathetic to her activism might wonder about her emotional life beyond the near-fanaticism of her dedication to Irish nationalism. Frazier shines a light into Gonne's private life that illuminates her relations with both Yeats and Millevoye, who is not well known (unless you have reason [End Page 150] to be familiar with late nineteenth-century French politics, and the Boulangist movement of which he was a ranking member). Frazier recovers Millevoye as an important personage in Gonne's life—after all, he was her first lover and the father of two of her children—whose political convictions reinforced her own. Frazier summons up the ambience of the time in France, its nationalism, its anti-Semitism, its politicians and their mistresses, its duels, its antiparliamentary threats ending with a whimper in the grim farce of General Boulanger's suicide. As well as running a salon on behalf of Millevoye, Gonne simultaneously performed as a muse figure for the young Irish nationalist Yeats, who saw in her the incarnation of romantic Ireland. That role, Frazier says, she "worked … for all it was worth." As with Millevoye, there was in her relationship with Yeats the combination of an intense personal alliance with a political allegiance to a revolutionary national ideal. She was an actress on occasion—notably in the first performance of Yeats's and Gregory's Cathleen Ni Houlihan—and in real life histrionically played the role of Yeats's muse. "[T]hey all write about some woman in their poetry," says that unchaste Penelope, Molly Bloom, in her early morning soliloquy as she briefly fantasizes about becoming the muse for Stephen Dedalus, who has just departed the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street after having a cup of cocoa with her husband. (Earlier in the day she had had an adulterous encounter with Blazes Boylan.) It still comes as something of a shock to recall, as Frazier's wicked title prompts us to do, that when Yeats first met her, both of them in their early twenties, she was already the mistress of the married Millevoye, and that she kept Yeats in the dark about this for a long time, and combined leading him on, as it were, with dark hints about tragic...