Pilgrim Soul E-Book

Daniel Mulhall

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 389

Beschreibung

When W.B. Yeats became the first Irish person to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, the Swedish Academy was crediting him with giving expression to 'the spirit of a whole nation'. The prize established Yeats as the unofficial poet laureate of a country that had, in his own words, been 'transformed utterly' during the preceding decade. From the Celtic Twilight of the 1890s to his death in 1939, Yeats's writings offer a unique window through which to view the changing Ireland of his time. In Pilgrim Soul, Daniel Mulhall's highly accessible and illuminating guide to Yeats, the poet's special role in Irish affairs is examined closely. Each chapter opens with a major Yeats poem through which Mulhall examines the historical events that inspired it. Along the way, he explores Yeats's 'indomitable' Irishness, the roots of his periodic disenchantment with Ireland and the conservative politics of his later years as well as the way Yeats's lifelong encounter with Irish affairs helped reshape his poetry. Throughout his life, Yeats produced compelling images of his homeland for readers in Ireland and around the world. As a personal journey through Yeats's poetry and his life, Pilgrim Soul mirrors Daniel Mulhall's own four decades as an ambassador for Ireland, its people and its culture.

Leseprobe

DANIEL MULHALL is a retired diplomat who has served as Ireland‘s Ambassador in Kuala Lumpur, Berlin, London and Washington, and was a member of the Irish Government’s delegation at the negotiations that produced the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Since his retirement in 2022, he has been Global Distinguished Professor of Irish Studies at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge University, and a Fellow at the Institute of Politics, Harvard University. Throughout his diplomatic career, he lectured and published widely on Irish history and literature and, in 2022, he produced the bestselling and critically acclaimed Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey (New Island Books). He is a consultant with the global law firm DLA Piper and Honorary President of the Yeats Society, Sligo.

Praise for Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey

‘He writes about Ulysses with exuberance and evident enjoyment.’

Dublin Review of Books

‘An excellent guide through daunting terrain.’

Hot Press

‘Cleverly decodes all 18 episodes of the novel.’

Irish Central

‘An informed, enjoyable guide, it homes in on Ulysses’ emotional core.’

Irish Independent

‘Powerfully, [Mulhall] argues that Joyce and Ireland for him are indissociable and that he retains a burning relevance today.’

Irish Times

‘Releases the great masterpiece from its reputation of impenetrability. An affectionate, accessible tribute.’

Sunday Independent

‘Highly readable, personable and well researched.’

The Times

PILGRIM SOUL

First published in 2023 by

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Daniel Mulhall, 2023

The right of Daniel Mulhall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-881-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84840-882-1

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Set in 11.5 on 15.5pt Baskerville Display PT

Typeset by JVR Creative India

Edited by Neil Burkey, neilburkey.com

Cover design by Jack Smyth, jacksmyth.co

Cover image: W.B. Yeats by George Charles Beresford © National Portrait Gallery, London and ‘Easter 1916’ (detail), by permission of United Agents and Caitríona Yeats.

Printed by L&C, Poland, lcprinting.eu

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Greta, my ‘pilgrim soul’ and lifelong companion, and to my latest grandchild, Arthur Tibor Mulhall, born while I was completing this book.

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1‘Those masterful images’: Yeats’s Ireland

Chapter 2‘That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong’: Yeats and the Literary Revival

Chapter 3‘The noisy set’: Yeats at the Turn of the Century, 1896–1904

Chapter 4‘For men were born to pray and save’: The Strange Death of Romantic Ireland

Chapter 5‘A terrible beauty’: Yeats’s Easter Rising

Chapter 6‘We had fed the heart on fantasies’: Yeats on the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, 1918–23

Chapter 7‘We the great gazebo built’: The Anglo-Irish Yeats

Chapter 8‘And say my glory was I had such friends’: Yeats in the 1930s

Chapter 9‘Cast a cold eye’: Yeats’s Achievement

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Notes

Abbreviations

WORKS BY YEATS

Au.

Autobiographies

CL1

John Kelly & Eric Domville (eds),

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Vol. 1, 1885–1895

CL2

Warwick Gould et al. (eds),

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Vol. II, 1896–1900

CL3

John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard (eds),

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Vol. III, 1901–1904

CL4

John Kelly & Ronald Schuchard (eds),

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Vol. IV, 1901–1904

E&I

Essays and Introductions

Exp.

Explorations

Ideals

Lady Augusta Gregory (ed.),

Ideals in Ireland

Letters

Allan Wade (ed.),

The Letters of W.B. Yeats

LNI

Letters to a New Island

Mem.

Denis Donoghue (ed.),

W.B. Yeats Memoirs

SC

Selected Criticism

Sen.

Donald R. Pearce (ed.),

The Senate Speeches of W.B. Yeats

UP1

John P. Frayne (ed.),

Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats: 1, First Reviews and Articles, 1886–1896

UP2

John P. Frayne & Colton Johnson (eds),

Uncollected Prose by W.B. Yeats: reviews, articles and other miscellaneous prose, 1897–1939

Var.

Peter Allt & Russell K. Alspach (eds),

The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats

YGL

Anna MacBride White & A. Norman Jeffares (eds),

Always Your Friend: the Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893–1938

YY

Edward Callan (ed.),

Yeats on Yeats: the last introductions and the ‘Dublin’ Edition

WORKS ABOUT YEATS

Chron.

John S. Kelly,

W.B. Yeats: A Chronology

Foster 1997

R.F. Foster,

W.B. Yeats: A Life: I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914

Foster 2003

R.F. Foster,

W.B. Yeats: A Life: II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939

NC

A. Norman Jeffares,

A New Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Introduction

I wrote this book in New York, Cambridge and Dublin in the year after my retirement from Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs. I did so to mark the 100th anniversary of W.B. Yeats’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in December 1923. In many ways, this project is the consummation of a lifelong interest in Yeats’s ‘indomitable Irishry’, which, in ‘Under Ben Bulben’, he urged us ‘in coming days’ to embrace. Yeats certainly followed that precept and was, through the twists and turns of his life and work, always indomitably Irish, even if not all of his contemporaries always saw him in that way.

I first became interested in Yeats’s Irishness during my college days, when I wrote an MA thesis on the poet’s nationalism. His significance as a witness to Irish history during a transformative era for Ireland continued to occupy my attention during four decades of diplomatic life spent in nine countries across the globe. I came to see Yeats as an asset in telling the complex story of Ireland’s struggle for freedom in the opening decades of the twentieth century. His poetry also attracted interest and admiration from people around the world with no ancestral connection to Ireland, but who developed an affinity with us. That is all part of Yeats’s bounteous literary legacy. Ireland captures far more attention than it would if it did not have writers of Yeats’s calibre to help brand us in the eyes of the world. Over the years, I have spoken at Yeats Societies in India, Western Australia and Korea, whose members were drawn to Yeats for different reasons.

I had the privilege of representing Ireland as a diplomat for forty-four of the Irish state’s first hundred years. Thus, for me, 1922 is the pivotal year in modern Irish history, the moment when Irish independence went from being a long-held aspiration to a lived reality. As a student of history, I have always been intrigued by the manner in which Ireland broke free from Britain, which, having been among the victors in World War I, remained one of the world’s leading powers. How did a people that had been so Famine-damaged and demographically depleted keep the flame of independence alight? And against a backdrop of the failure of successive nineteenth-century efforts to secure self-government, how did early twentieth-century nationalism manage to pull it off? Was it that the times had changed and become more propitious for Ireland, or were there new elements in the nationalist mix that paved the way for independence? Was the literary revival that Yeats pioneered part of the explanation for Ireland’s political transformation?

Was it pure coincidence that Irish literature flowered so brilliantly during those same years, with the publication of James Joyce’s three great works, Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), alongside two major Yeats collections, The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)? My sense is that the Irish political and literary achievements of that era were linked, as both were the output of an accomplished, impatient generation that came to the fore at the turn of the century and sowed seeds of revolution and artistic creativity. James Joyce was, after all, an exact contemporary of Ireland’s longest-serving political leader, Éamon de Valera.

Yeats was born fifteen or so years before the leading lights of the revolutionary generation, but he was witness to their deeds and a contributor to the milieu from which they emerged. By his own account, he became an Irish writer when he was just twenty and, despite the temptation he must occasionally have felt to follow the path trodden by Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw in the mainstream of English literature, Yeats stayed the course.

Yeats’s Irish turas (the Irish word for journey and pilgrimage) was a winding one. Born into a family that was part of Ireland’s Anglo-Irish Protestant community, he was not an obvious candidate for a role as the premier poet of nationalist Ireland. His discovery during the 1880s of the Gaelic tradition in literature and mythology turned out to be a life-changing event. It caused him to become the prime proponent and advocate of an Irish national literature in the English language. Yeats was part of a wider cultural revival, involving also the Gaelic Athletic Association(GAA) and the Gaelic League, that helped remake Irish identity at the turn of the century. This, coupled with his enduring fascination with Maud Gonne, caused him to become a fairly robust nationalist in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Indeed, he was probably sworn in as a member of the oath-bound, clandestine Irish Republican Brotherhood at that time, an unusual distinction for a major poet.

The first decade of the twentieth century was difficult for Yeats, with the shock of Maud’s impetuous marriage to John MacBride, followed by its tempestuous disintegration. Those upheavals in his private life occurred alongside the exacting labours entailed in steering the Abbey Theatre during its formative years. He was also troubled by the emergence of more vehement brands of nationalism rooted in Catholic and Gaelic identities hostile to Yeats’s preference for a hybrid version of Irishness that would blend Gaelic and English elements.

Having proclaimed the death of Romantic Ireland in 1913, Yeats resurrected his Irish engagement in response to the 1916 Rising and spent most of the rest of his life living in Ireland, as a Senator and an internationally celebrated Irishman. His concern about rising lawlessness peaked during the Irish Civil War, which he observed at close quarters. It brought his incipient conservative inclinations to the fore. Due to his frustration with developments in Ireland, he conjured up a cult of the Anglo-Irish tradition, which exposed him to accusations that his nationalism lacked proper native roots. And in the 1930s, he had a regrettable brush with fascism and dabbled disgracefully in eugenics. Despite being out of tune with ‘the sort now growing up’ in Ireland, at the end of his life he insisted that ‘Ancient Ireland knew it all’ and paid homage to the ‘seven heroic centuries’ of struggle against outside domination of Irish affairs.

In the pages that follow, I try to chart Yeats’s elongated, meandering Irish journey. This exercise has three connected aims: to establish a deeper understanding of Yeats’s Irishness, to view Ireland through his eyes and to plot the manner in which his engagement with Ireland affected his writing. By exploring Yeats’s involvement with the Ireland of his time, I am also probing the puzzle of how Yeats, the quintessential late-romantic, became one of the essential modern poets of his time and ours.

1

‘Those masterful images’

Yeats’s Ireland

The Circus Animals’ Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

Maybe at last being but a broken man,

I must be satisfied with my heart, although

Winter and summer till old age began

My circus animals were all on show,

Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,

Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes?

First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose

Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,

Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,

Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,

That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;

But what cared I that set him on to ride,

I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride?

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,

‘The Countess Cathleen’ was the name I gave it;

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,

So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,

And this brought forth a dream and soon enough

This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread

Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;

Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said

It was the dream itself enchanted me:

Character isolated by a deed

To engross the present and dominate memory.

Players and painted stage, took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start,

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.1

‘To engross the present and dominate memory’

In his last years, beset by ill health and often restricted to a diet of fruit and milk, W.B. Yeats’s poetry became more autobiographical as he delved into his memory, looking back over his eventful life as poet, playwright, essayist and public figure. In ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ he gathered around him ‘the images of thirty years’, peopled by members of his personal pantheon – Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, Hugh Lane, Hazel Lavery and, among the political clan, Arthur Griffith (‘staring in hysterical pride’) and Kevin O’Higgins (‘a soul incapable of remorse or rest’) – with all of whom, he insisted, you could:

Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends

And say my glory was I had such friends.

Another late poem, ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’, continues this celebration of his own inner circle – John O’Leary, Maud Gonne, Standish O’Grady and his father John B. Yeats – ‘All the Olympians; a thing never known again’. They became Olympian because that was what W.B. Yeats, master image-maker, declared them to be.

‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ does something different. It casts the mind back over Yeats’s writing life from the ‘enchanted islands, allegorical dreams’ of his younger days, to the ‘themes of the embittered heart’ and the ‘players and the painted stage’ from his middle years, and on to ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’, where the aged poet ‘must lie down’ now that his ‘ladder’s gone’ and he is no longer busy climbing Mount Parnassus. That ‘rag and bone shop’ is a far cry from the ‘crowd of stars’ in which his imagination hid its face in ‘When You Are Old’, the early Yeats poem that contains the term ‘pilgrim soul’. At the heart of Yeats’s story is how he progressed with his poetry from inhabiting the late-romantic ‘bee-loud glade’ in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ to being stalked by decidedly modernist images like ‘a mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street’ that might have migrated from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Many of ‘those masterful images’ that run through Yeats’s poetry offer insight into the Ireland of Yeats’s time. And, while he believed that you could trace Ireland’s history in the ‘lineaments’ of his friends’ faces, for me Yeats’s poetry possesses that same capacity. The ‘masterful images’ Yeats created act as signposts to Irish history. His poetic insights have shown themselves to possess the kind of permanence he hoped would attach to the words he had ‘carved on a stone at Thoor2 Ballylee’, his west of Ireland summer base for the most productive decade of his writing life, 1918–1928:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates,

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

This book seeks to do what Yeats did with those late-life poems. It covers biographical ground, as does ‘Municipal Gallery’ and the literary terrain mapped out in ‘Circus Animals’. It is written with a focus on Yeats’s poetry and his Irishness, the ‘indomitable Irishry’ he wrote about in his poetic epitaph, ‘Under Ben Bulben’. I have approached Yeats’s life and work with the general reader in mind, and have drawn heavily on Yeats’s poetry and prose, believing that his ‘words alone are certain good’.3 During my travels over the years, I have been asked to recommend a manageable, accessible account of Yeats’s life and work, but often struggled to come up with an answer. This book sets out to explore Yeats through an Irish lens, drawing attention to his status as the paramount Irish literary chronicler of his age. It is written for readers with an interest in Yeats, or a curiosity about him, but who are disinclined to dip into the deep scholarly pool that wells around his literary career.

Stockholm 1923

I begin my Yeats story long before I was born, in the lifetime of my fervently republican paternal grandparents (who probably would not have cared too much for the Free State-supporting Senator Yeats), at a time when a newly independent Ireland had just emerged from a damaging, divisive civil war. The year was 1923 and the place, Stockholm.

When the Swedish Academy announced its 1923 Nobel literature laureate in the autumn of that year, it opted for a writer who had produced what the Academy described as ‘always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’. The poet’s name was William Butler Yeats4 and his nation had the previous year achieved a measure of self-government as the Irish Free State, which had been formed at the end of a six-year struggle for freedom that began with the Easter Rising of 1916, an event that the poet had elegised in his magisterial history poem, ‘Easter 1916’. Yeats modestly acknowledged the wider context in which he was being awarded the Nobel Prize, remarking that, ‘I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.’5

Yeats learned of his Nobel Prize one night in November 1923 when he was telephoned by Bertie Smyllie, an Irish Times journalist and future editor of the paper who was asked by the then editor, John Healy, to inform Yeats about the award and to record his response. Yeats’s reaction, demonstrating that he had down-to-earth preoccupations alongside his more ethereal ones, was ‘And tell me, Bertie, how much is it worth?’6 The answer was £7,000, a tidy sum in the early 1920s, which would have a current value (2023) of almost €400,000.

Yeats later recalled that news of his success reached him between 10 and 11 p.m., after which he and his wife George celebrated with a plate of sausages, having failed to find a bottle of wine in their cellar. The following evening, during a presumably more elaborate dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel, a congratulatory telegram arrived from James Joyce, who, for the remaining eighteen years of his life, never managed to find favour with the Nobel Committee.

A few weeks later, Mr and Mrs Yeats set off by ferry for Sweden, where the coveted prize was conferred on this almost ‘60-year-old smiling public man’ by King Gustav V at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December. It came at a time of great achievement in Irish literature. Joyce’s Ulysses had been published almost two years before, while Sean O’Casey’s first great play, The Shadow of a Gunman, premiered at the Abbey Theatre in April 1923. Yeats himself, who had lately returned to Ireland and been appointed to the Senate, was in full creative flow. Two years before he had published Michael Robartes and the Dancer, containing ‘Easter 1916’ and ‘The Second Coming’, and had recently written ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, containing that quintessentially evocative Yeats line, ‘caught in the cold snows of a dream’. This was also a time of huge turmoil in Irish life, with the ending of the Civil War and the fraught consolidation of the Irish Free State.

At the award ceremony on 10 December, Yeats spoke about the Irish literary movement, in which he had played a leading role:

Thirty years ago a number of Irish writers met together in societies and began a remorseless criticism of the literature of their country. It was their dream that by freeing it from provincialism they might win for it European recognition. I owe much to those men, still more to those who joined our movement a few years later, and when I return to Ireland these men and women, now growing old like myself, will see in this great honour a fulfilment of that dream. I in my heart know how little I might have deserved it if they had never existed.

Per Hallström, Chairman of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, spoke perceptively about Yeats’s identification with his homeland. He noted that:

Yeats’s association with the life of a people saved him from the barrenness which attended so much of the effort for beauty that marked his age. Around him as the central point and leader arose, within a group of his countrymen in the literary world of London, that mighty movement which has been named the Celtic Revival and which created a new national literature, an Anglo-Irish literature.

The foremost and most versatile poet of this group was Yeats. His rousing and rallying personality caused the movement to grow and flower very quickly, by giving a common aim to hitherto scattered forces or by encouraging new forces, previously unconscious of their existence.

And that ‘mighty movement’ was the subject of Yeats’s Nobel lecture, delivered on 15 December 1923. In ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’, Yeats sought to claim his share of the credit for the coming of Irish independence. The words he spoke on that occasion went all out to highlight the significance and the influence of the literary movement he had come to personify. It is an illustration of Yeats’s sense of history and of his powers as a gifted prose stylist, at his brilliant best in this opening salvo:

The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned away from parliamentary politics: an event was conceived and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event’s long gestation. Dr. Hyde founded the Gaelic League, which was for many years to substitute for political argument a Gaelic grammar, and for political meetings village gatherings, where songs were sung and stories told in the Gaelic language. Meanwhile I had begun a movement in English, in the language in which modern Ireland thinks and does its business; founded certain societies where clerks, working men, men of all classes, could study those Irish poets, novelists, and historians who had written in English, and as much of Gaelic literature as had been translated into English.7

This is an example of Yeats’s ability to take hold of Ireland’s history and to trace its ‘lineaments’ in accordance with his own imaginative vision. As his fellow poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, Yeats was ‘one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them’.8

Let me parse the image of Ireland’s recent past that Yeats conjured up in his Stockholm lecture. In his view of things, the political demise and subsequent death of Charles Stewart Parnell had caused the Irish people to turn away from parliamentary politics and devote more attention to cultural movements. Those movements were part of a ‘stir of thought’ that had radicalised Ireland, unleashing forces that delivered Irish independence in 1922 on the back of a war of independence waged between 1919 and 1921. Mind you, this is not a set of ideas that Yeats first came up with when he sat down to write his Nobel lecture. He had been banging the drum about Parnell’s fall giving space for the emergence of cultural movements since shortly after the death of Ireland’s ‘uncrowned king’ in October 1891.

Yeats’s historical schema attributes considerable political and societal influence to the Irish cultural revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now, let me be clear, Yeats’s thesis can be, and has been, challenged. Yeats’s biographer, Roy Foster, writing in his influential study of modern Ireland, wondered if ‘given the circumstances of the time, the activities of the intelligentsia were really more significant than the actions of the politicians and the “agitators”’.9

Another study of the prelude to Irish independence, Patrick Maume’s The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life, 1891–1918, though it takes its title from Yeats’s Nobel lecture, barely mentions the poet or the literary movement he personified. Yeats’s ideas about the course of Irish history during his lifetime, the notion that a post-Parnell vacuum resulted in political energy being diverted into cultural channels, attests to the value of what we now call ‘soft power’ – that ‘stir of thought’, as Yeats worded it – in bringing about transformational political change.

The centenary of Yeats’s Nobel Prize, the first to be won by an Irish figure, seems like an opportune time to take a look at Yeats’s life and work against the background of the country in which he was born and by which at different stages of his life he was inspired and exasperated. But, at all times, Ireland preoccupied him. Early in his life he was gripped by Irish folklore and mythology, and the grip that Ireland had on him never relaxed although its density changed with the passage of time. Now that more than eight decades have passed since Yeats’s death and the Ireland he knew has been ‘transformed utterly’, it may be asked, why does Yeats continue to warrant biographical and critical attention? My answer is that the words he pieced together in his poems still speak to us, and that Yeats’s time, coinciding with the birth of modern Ireland, remains parental to ours.

New York 2022

As I was busy writing this book during my time teaching Irish Studies at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, in the closing months of 2022, one day I wandered into Strand Books, a New York institution located at the edge of Greenwich Village. Among the titles on prominent display that caught my eye that day were Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. All three titles were clearly inspired by Yeats’s writing, and they testify to his extraordinary ability to craft phrases that were destined to stand the test of time.

Books about Northern Ireland abound with Yeatsian echoes; take, for example, Jonathan Powell’s Great Hatred, Little Room. Great Hatred is also the title of Ronan McGreevy’s book on the assassination by the IRA of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson in London in June 1922. Wilson was a contemporary of Yeats’s, having been born in Dublin into a Protestant family a year before him, but Wilson, who became a staunch Unionist, developed a radically different response to developments in their ruffled homeland of the late nineteenth century.10 In 1976 Jill and Leon Uris called their book on Ireland A Terrible Beauty. But it is not just books on Ireland that reach for Yeats’s words for their titles. In 1998 Roger Cohen chose Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo as the title for a book about the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, while Elizabeth Dore called her study of the Cuban revolution How Things Fall Apart. I could go on. My point is that Yeats’s words have had a lengthy and influential afterlife that few writers manage to achieve.

In my teaching at NYU I sought to explore Ireland’s history using Yeats, Joyce, O’Casey, Synge and others as guides. Although written while I made the transition from a 44-year career with Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs to what I hope will be a fruitful and satisfying retirement, there is a sense in which this book is the culmination of a lifelong project aimed at understanding Ireland’s greatest English-language poet, and through him the Ireland in which he lived.

What I am offering here is not a full-scale biography, but a selective biographical exploration that looks at Yeats’s dialogue with Ireland during an era of profound political transformation, which he observed with his keen poet’s eye and his gift for conjuring up some truly ‘masterful images’. Throughout his life he drew inspiration from Ireland and, in his writings, set out to reimagine and, in any way he could, to reshape the country of his birth, a country for which he maintained an undying affection.

Although lacking the kind of imagination needed for creative writing, I have long been under the spell of Yeats and the history of Ireland during his lifetime. Since 2019 I have enjoyed the privilege of being Honorary President of the Sligo-based Yeats Society, which celebrates the life and works of Yeats and his talented family in a place that meant so much to the poet and was a source of inspiration for him, especially in his early writings.

Cork 1975

Yeats died in January 1939, a decade and a half before I was born, and I have only ever met one person who could remember encountering him in person. The former Irish rugby international Des O’Brien, a member of the Grand Slam-winning team of 1948, when I met him in Edinburgh in 1999, recalled how as a boy he had been playing with his father at Rathfarnham Golf Club when they came across Yeats out walking and young Des was duly introduced to the famous poet.

I first came across Yeats’s poetry as part of the Irish Leaving Certificate English syllabus during the early 1970s. At Mount Sion School in Waterford I was fortunate to have a talented and far-sighted English teacher, Sean Crowe, who inspired in his pupils an enthusiasm for literature. This boyhood interest in writing, and especially in poetry, has persisted through the many changes the decades have brought. I have never written a poem, but have always admired the power of a well-tempered verse and have been posting lines of Irish poetry daily on my Twitter account @DanMulhall since 2015. I value poetry for its capacity to enable us to ‘see into the life of things’, including into the elongated byways of our history.

I was a student at University College Cork when I became absorbed with Yeats’s poetry. One day in the college bookshop, I picked up a copy of Yeats’s Selected Poetry. I still have that book, with its introduction by the Yeats scholar A. Norman Jeffares. Back in the 1970s I underlined some of Jeffares’s words, including his comment that Yeats had set out ‘to write for an Irish audience and about Ireland’ and ‘to re-create a specifically Irish literature’.11

Even with the passage of almost half a century, I have a vivid recollection of the impression Yeats’s poems had on me during the summer of 1975, when I was preparing for my undergraduate examinations and considering what I might do in the way of postgraduate study. Enthralled by Yeats’s poems, I temporarily shelved other course reading. That experience left me with an abiding impression of the power and historical importance of his writing. I was struck especially by the poems that addressed aspects of twentieth-century Irish history, ‘No Second Troy’, ‘September 1913’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘The Second Coming’ and ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, to name but a few.

It seemed to me that Yeats’s work offered a precious insight into that seminal era of Irish history, the two decades between the turn of the century and the attainment of independence in 1922. His was a selective view, of course, shaped by personal preoccupations and prejudices, but no less compelling for that limitation. Yeats’s story and the story of Ireland in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth are fortuitously intertwined. That entanglement has yielded a rich harvest of ‘masterful images’ of Ireland’s cultural and political belle époque.

The literary critic Seamus Deane observed that, ‘Yeats began his career by inventing an Ireland amenable to his imagination. He ended by finding an Ireland recalcitrant to it.’12 The following pages explore Yeats’s imaginative inventiveness and also grapple with Ireland’s recalcitrance; what he might have seen as a cussed unwillingness to bow to his romantic urgings. Yeats yearned for what he envisioned as a romantic Ireland, but what came out of the mill of history was a chequered Ireland: a stable democracy but also a reservoir of disappointed idealisms. In his final play, The Death of Cuchulain, he wrote that he was ‘out of fashion and out of date like the antiquated romantic stuff’.13 It is true that the Ireland of the 1930s was not the one he had dreamt of, but he could nonetheless look back with satisfaction at having, in the words of one scholar, ‘helped bring a regenerated nation into being’.14

Inspired by this reading of Yeats’s poems as a form of historical narrative, I decided to devote my postgraduate study at University College Cork to a literary-historical topic. Two years later, having studied under the guidance of Professor Joe Lee at UCC, I ended up calling my thesis ‘The indomitable Irishry’: writers and politics in Ireland, 1890–1939. It looked at the evolution of Yeats’s nationalism from the 1890s to the 1930s, that of his contemporary and lifelong friend George William Russell (Æ) (1867–1935), poet, painter, mystic and editor, and of the short-story writer and commentator Sean O’Faolain.

As a young man in the years after the death of Parnell in 1891, Yeats devoted huge effort to the creation of a national literature for Ireland. After 1900 his vision of Ireland darkened as he grappled with what he termed the ‘seeming needs of my fool-driven land’. This caused him considerable frustration, as did ‘the day’s war with every knave and dolt / Theatre business, management of men’, when he strove to develop the Abbey Theatre and pushed back against its detractors, notably those who were offended by Synge’sThe Playboy of the Western World.

The prime source of Yeats’s disenchantment was the emergence of what he saw as a narrower brand of nationalism from that which he had espoused during the 1890s. Beset by multiple frustrations, Yeats composed his dirge for the death of ‘romantic Ireland’ in ‘September 1913’, but less than three years later he was mesmerised by the ‘terrible beauty’ of Easter 1916, which revived his interest in Ireland’s potential. On the back of the events of 1916, and seemingly excited about the prospect of contributing to Ireland as it moved towards independence, Yeats returned from London to reside in Ireland, where he spent most of the next decade and a half.

Yeats experienced renewed disenchantment during the 1920s and 1930s as he faced the realities of literary censorship and the intensely Catholic atmosphere of independent Ireland. In search of refuge, his response was to immerse himself in the Anglo-Irish tradition, which saw him develop a cult-like devotion to the great Anglo-Irish figures of the past: Swift, Burke, Grattan, Goldsmith, Berkeley and Parnell. Then there were the deeply conservative views he espoused in the 1920s and 1930s, a kind of haughty, aristocratic nationalism, which drew him into an unfortunate but fleeting association with Ireland’s homegrown fascist movement, the Blueshirts, and to the expression of some wildly unappealing political views in On the Boiler, published in the year of his death.

Despite the ups and downs of his engagement with Ireland, to the end of his days Yeats remained absorbed with the affairs of the country of his birth. Indeed, in his poetic epitaph, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, written in the final months of his life, Yeats returned to the source of his late nineteenth-century Irish idealism, writing that ‘ancient Ireland knew it all’.

There is something deeply fascinating about those decades between the fall of Parnell in 1890 and the death of Yeats in 1939. That was a time when Ireland was transformed from a restless province of the United Kingdom to an independent state in a position to assert its neutrality during the greatest crisis in modern Irish history, World War II. That same period also witnessed the emergence of a distinctively Irish tradition in literature, which became one of the glories of twentieth-century Ireland.

During this time, writers of the calibre of Yeats, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien emerged from an Ireland that was undergoing a fraught transition from the Victorian world of Charles Stewart Parnell to the Ireland of Éamon de Valera. Those writers were not all part of Yeats’s movement (indeed Joyce sought to distance himself from the Irish literary revival, and Flann O’Brien frequently poked fun at it), but the influence of Yeats runs through this entire era of exceptional literary achievement. Any effort to understand Ireland’s evolution between the failure of the Fenian rebellion of 1867 and the outbreak of war in 1939 will, I believe, profit from a study of Yeats’s life and work.

New Delhi 1982

My favourite reminiscence to do with Yeats comes from a distinguished Indian woman I met in 1982. She was indeed ‘old and grey’, although she was certainly not ‘full of sleep’. I was still a young man in my mid-twenties when I had this experience, one that made me fall under the spell of W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘When You Are Old’.

I recall the occasion as if it were yesterday. The location was a house in New Delhi’s Hanuman Road, belonging to a renowned Indian figure, Mrs Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900–1990). At that time I was based in India and had come to know Mrs Pandit’s granddaughter, Gita Sahgal, at whose wedding I was to act as best man. In the lead-up to her granddaughter’s wedding Mrs Pandit had kindly invited my wife, Greta, and me to lunch at her residence.

Then in her early eighties, Mrs Pandit was the sister of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), one of the outstanding political figures of the twentieth century. She herself had had a long innings in public life, as India’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the United Nations, Ireland and Britain. Amongst her many achievements, Mrs Pandit had been the first woman ever to preside over the annual United Nations General Assembly. When I met Mrs Pandit, her brother’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, was India’s serving Prime Minister, although the two women were by that time estranged because of political disagreements.

It was a memorable lunch in the company of this still formidable woman, who had accumulated a wealth of experience and life’s wisdom. Also at lunch were various family members and friends, and the conversation centred on Indian history, culture and politics. When she discovered I was Irish, Mrs Pandit spoke of her fondness for Ireland and the country’s influence on India’s struggle for independence.

In her autobiography, Mrs Pandit recalls that the outbreak of World War I had not had much of an impact on her generation of Indians, but that she had followed the Easter Rising of 1916 with an ‘emotional interest’. A few years later, the death of Cork Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney had ‘caused a tremendous wave of indignation in India’, and the young Vijaya Lakshmi Nehru entered a competition with an essay entitled ‘On the Meaning of Terence MacSwiney’s Death’, for which she won a gold medal. As Ambassador in Dublin many years later, she said that her greatest enjoyment had been to visit the Abbey Theatre.15

During this memorable lunch, Mrs Pandit launched into an impressive, word-perfect recitation of ‘When You Are Old’ and ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, poems she informed me she had memorised while interned with her brother during the 1930s, when both were participants in the struggle for Indian independence. Yeats’s work, she said, had been a source of inspiration and strength to the Nehru family during their incarceration as opponents of British rule in India.

Several members of her family, including her daughter, the novelist Nayantara Sahgal, who were gathered around the lunch table, joined in the recitation, revealing that Yeats’s work was a source of shared enthusiasm across the generations. There was something deeply moving about being 4,500 miles from home, in a very different cultural environment, and learning that an Irish poet was so revered by this distinguished Indian family.

That afternoon in the company of Mrs Pandit and her family was not the only time during my years in India when Yeats’s international renown was brought home to me. I came across many Yeats enthusiasts there, some of whom founded a Yeats Society of India and invited me to be their inaugural speaker. It was Yeats’s reputation as a nationalist, his advocacy of Rabindranath Tagore and his abiding interest in Eastern philosophy and mysticism that mainly attracted his many Indian admirers.

On another unforgettable occasion I heard Karan Singh, son of the last Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, and a leading Indian politician, address a literary conference in New Delhi. He spoke about the importance of poetry, quoting freely from Yeats’s work, all from memory, to illustrate his arguments. His knowledge of Yeats’s work was deeply impressive and, through Yeats and other Irish writers, he had acquired a high regard for, and extensive knowledge of, Ireland.

Such was the appeal of Yeats’s work in 1980s India that I was asked to deliver a paper on ‘Yeats and the idea of a national literature for Ireland’ to the annual gathering of the All-India English Teachers’ Association, an audience of some 1,500 conference participants. This topic had a resonance in India, which, like Ireland, had had to grapple with issues of language and identity. The teachers I met during that conference had never left India, but Irish writing had given them a window through which they could peer into our faraway ‘green island’.

When I met Greta in New Delhi in 1980, I often read Yeats’s poems to her. Born in Australia, she had at that time never been to Ireland, and I considered Yeats’s work as good an introduction as any to the charms of my homeland. At our wedding ceremony in Delhi in 1982 I recited ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ and ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. ‘When You Are Old’ would not have been a suitable choice for such an occasion! A few years later, while living in Greta’s homeplace, Perth, Western Australia, we became involved with the local Yeats Society. I can fondly recall one particular evening when I talked about Yeats at the home of one of the leading Australian novelists of her generation, Mary Durack, in her garden on the banks of the Swan river. That Australian Yeats Society later presented ornamental door handles to the church at Drumcliff in the form of a West Australian black swan and one of the ‘wild swans at Coole’.

Yeats’s ‘indomitable Irishry’

In the English language at least, Yeats is a rarity in being a nineteenth-century writer (born in 1865) whose writing continued to flourish in the period after World War I. His nineteenth-century lyric poems, with their delicate, musical phrases that many poetry lovers can readily quote, are probably his best-loved works. They tend to pop up whenever people in Britain and Ireland are asked to choose their favourite poems. In a list of One Hundred Favourite Poems chosen some years back by listeners of the UK’s Classic FM radio station, Yeats had two poems in the top twenty most popular choices, with only Shakespeare being similarly represented.16

While works like ‘When You Are Old’ enjoy enduring popularity, Yeats’s reputation as a major writer rests primarily on the poems he wrote during the twentieth century. It has always been an interest of mine as to how Yeats went from writing lines like:

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The Golden apples of the sun.

to the distinctively twentieth-century tones of such poems as ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, in which he rages against life’s infirmities:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence; …

George Russell (Æ) put his finger on this aspect of Yeats’s achievement, ‘the new and strange beauty’ of his later poetry. Æ wrote:

So many poets labour to make a style for themselves, and then become the slaves of their style … But in the case of Yeats we find that the later poet is not only intellectually the lord of the earlier poet, but that as a stylist there is an amazing advance, yet without any diminution of emotion or imagination … It is his habit of continual intellectual adventure which has kept his poetry fresh … It is that untiring energy of mind which has made his later poetry as we read it seem new and strange and beautiful, and the plain words seem many-coloured, as if they had been dusted over with powdered jewels, not less glowing for all their absence of that vivid colour he used so lavishly in The Wanderings of Oisín or The Shadowy Waters.17

I want to argue that at least part of the explanation of the miracle of Yeats’s never-ending poetic vigour lies in his immersion in Irish affairs. That was probably a curse for Æ as he enmeshed himself in the rigours of weekly political journalism, which made him a popular figure but deprived him of the time to get the best out of his own, admittedly lesser, poetic talent. I take the view that Yeats’s own brand of indomitable Irishness helped keep him fully creative into old age. Disenchantment with aspects of Irish life in the twentieth century helped harden his poetry. Yeats’s verse allows us to plot his changing responses to the Ireland of his time. Some of his finest poems deal with key moments in modern Irish history. His words still shape how many readers view Ireland’s past.