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Yeats and Modernity

PARADIGMS OF PERIPHERAL MODERNITY IN LORCA AND
YEATS
"For there is a similarity between Ireland and Spain in terms of their sense—in the
nineteenth and part of the twentieth century—of living a life which appeared to be
peripheral to the Western discourse of modernity
...
In
Timothy Webb’s words, Yeats ‘resisted the influence [
...
xxxviii)
...
Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis’s book Modernism and Ireland does
not have a single essay on Yeats, since his ‘aesthetic premises [
...
︎” p410

Absorbed by orator of Ireland
...
Retained
sonorous verbal metres, even while there were other forces in English poetry
which were beginning to break down the dominance of rhyme
...
I shall be exploring the idea that the ghost functions in their work
as an indication of the repressed presence of the subaltern, which, for reasons of
race, religion, or ethnicity, ‘lies’ (in both sense of the term) on the wrong side of the
law, which I interpret also to encompass the sense of a rational
empiricism… postcolonial ghosts” p412
"It is important to underline that Yeats focuses on language as not just the symptom
but indeed the building-block of culture;” p413
"Write for the ear’, Yeats once told himself” p418
"For a number of thinkers in the twentieth century, language became the site of a
painful self-reflexivity; no longer simply a vehicle through which knowledge could

emerge, language became itself the key to understanding some of the laws of the
universe
...
We have already see how both Yeats and Lorca clung on to
traditional metres, which in turn made their verse more sonorous, more rhymeladen, some would say more incantatory
...
” p420
"As we can see, Yeats and Lorca—while to some extent peripheral to the discourse
of modernity (typified by Yeats as ‘the man on the tube’, and Lorca as the ‘poet who
looks at his watch’)—were involved in similar ways in the reconstruction of an oral,
cultural archive which would allow something as non-rational as a fairy or the moon
leading a child away by his hand into the realm of non-human life
...
Not only do I claim that this late romantic/
decadent core is the “essence” of modernism, I also contend that its fascination
with the female body and with the sensibilities and imaginations of women testify to
avant garde artistsʼ drive to break through the heaped debris of the socially
symbolic order of Western culture and to resist turning new individual imaginary
visions into a replacement symbolic order, so as to preserve special access to the
singular experience of the trauma of vision
...
B
...
G
...
Nevertheless, the image he creates in his work of a people
dignified by an easy commerce with mythology and folklore alive yet reaching back into

antiquity was of powerful national appeal; it gratified the Irish wish to believe that the
successful neighbour nation was soulless, and that Ireland herself retained in spite, or
because, of her history of defeat, a moral and spiritual superiority
...
yes, Yeats’s folklore contributes to a national mythology but it also neglects the
social and political conditions of the Irish peasant
...
B
...
” p60
“…according to Daniel A
...
” p60
“Yeats’ Ireland is a promised land towards which Irish people should re-invent
themselves incessantly
...
” p58
“That Irish writers ought to choose Irish subjects was something Yeats
stressed again and again
...
B
...
He explains that Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to
be spoken or sung, "while English literature
...
He saw drama as the most effective
vehicle for stirring back to life the submerged imagination of the city-dwellers,
and for renewing their contact with the spoken word
...
B
...
But folklore and
anthropological interests, besides being often connected in the 1890s with
theosophical or occult investigations, opened a way into nationalism via
‘national tradition’” p260
“…he prophesied that Art in Ireland would unsure the role of religion: artists
must ‘take upon themselves the method and fervour of a priesthood… we
must baptise as well as preach” p260
“The lost world of childhood also stood for a long-lost world of social
dominance
...
He could not be a mere Home Ruler, so he found it necessary to differentiate
and be a Protestant Home Ruler; he thinks that Ireland practically never had a
leader who was not a Protestant - that is one of the fruits of commencing Irish
history at the year 1782; he sometimes writes poetry which no Irishman
understands or rather which no Irishman troubles his head to read; he thinks
Catholics are superstitious and believes in spooks himself; he [99] thinks they are
priestridden and he would like to go back to Paganism; he is a bigot who thinks that
he is broad-minded; a prig who thinks he is cultured; he does not understand
Ireland - a fact which would not be of much import if he did not firmly believe that he
is a philosopher
...
” Newspaper attack on Yeats in
1901 p263

“And like Pound, he found his way to a literary culture which could embrace a
politics of conscious, unashamed and authoritarian elitism
...
B
...
” p12

W
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YEATS AND IRISH TRADITION Quin
“The early Yeats filled his verse with Celtic names and phrases, as if he
needed to assure us and himself how very Celtic and Irish he is
...
Merely by expressing himself and his environment, he
shows himself to be an Irishman
...
But he prefers the historic events
that are still taking place against the background of that Irish landscape
...
B
...
There is
no doubt that he saw literature as having a crucial role in revitalising Irish
national pride and in creating a unified culture
...
James Joyce wrote to
Ezra Pound in 1920: ‘This is a very poetical epistle…it should be read in the
evening when the lake water is lapping’
...
” p90
To Ireland in the Coming Times:

“…clever pun in the alliterative ‘measure of her flying feet’, suggesting both
the transient, elusive nature of beauty and the metrical ‘feet’ of the poetry that
is inspired by that fleeting beauty
...
There was, to put it bluntly, more than
one kind of nationalism at work in late nineteenth century Ireland
...
F
...
Yeats, in this context, belongs
to a line of writers ‘whose occult preoccupations surely mirror a sense of
displacement, a loss of social and psychological integration, and an escapism
motivated by the threat of a takeover by the Catholic middle classes'” p96
After his provocative play in 1902, Cathleen ni Houlihan, he ‘turned aside
from Irish Politics’
...
He believes that throughout the 1890s Yeats
has been emphasising his ‘Irishness’ while minimising the Protestant tradition
to which he belonged
...
” p96
“To regard Irish nationalism at the ned of the nineteenth century as
wholeheartedly ‘anti-colonial’… is to overlook many of the cultural and
political complexities of the time
...

The Ireland that he envisaged was a nation with a distinctive cultural and
spiritual identity, an imagined community free of sectarian differences and
conflicts
...
His poems and his other activities in the pursuit of a new

national identity represent a monument which, more often than not, obscured the

achievement of younger writers’
...
Both poets attempted to penetrate to the
deepest levels of the human psyche through mysticism, history, and myth to
be able to speak to the collective mind of their peoples, to unite them around
the idea of a nation
...
B
...
” p96
"Yeats’s and Darwish’s resort to the personal, mystical, and mythological is
not an escape from reality, but actually an attempt to effect a change in
reality, to bridge the gap between thought and action, to make something
happen despite W
...
Auden’s (1940) insistence in his dedication to W
...

Yeats, “For poetry makes nothing happen
...
” p96
"This makes women ideal symbols of resistance to the world of reality
...
” p98
"This history of Ireland, for Yeats, is significantly pre-Christian, and thus presectarian as can be seen in the following lines: “Because the red-rosebordered hem/Of her, whose history began/Before God made the angelic
clan” (ibid)
...
The past that Yeats calls up does not belong to
the past, but to the present,” p100

Overcoming the "Contagion of Mimicry":
The Cosmopolitan Nationalism and
Modernist History of Rabindranath Tagore
and W
...
Yeats
Yeats was a nationalist, but his nationalism was different to other nationalists
...
" p78
“
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” p81

"Or as Yeats put it more succinctly, "all those who have pulled down a tyrant
...
84 Both authors noted this
trend in the 1920s and 1930s
...
” p87

"Just as modernist literature abandoned a linear narrative with a beginning, middle,
and end, and in- stead used techniques juxtaposing apparently unrelated images
and ideas, time shifts, and cyclic structures, modernist historical thought rejected
the idea of progress, and instead focused on timelessness and analogies between
widely sepa- rated ages, or posited a universal pattern of cycles” p89
"Finally, Tagore's and Yeats's theories indicate that it is not en- tirely unrealistic to
hope for a new cosmopolitanism, which respects cultural difference while insisting on
some fundamental universal values
...
” p99-100



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