Table Of ContentImagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats
New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature
Claire A. Culleton, Kent State University
Series Editor
Contemporary Irish Republican Prison Writing:
Writing and Resistance
by Lachlan Whalen (December 2007)
Narratives of Class in New Irish and Scottish Literature:
From Joyce to Kelman, Doyle, Galloway, and McNamee
by Mary M. McGlynn (April 2008)
Irish Periodical Culture, 1937–1972:
Genre in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland
by Malcolm Ballin (August 2008)
Joyce through Lacan and Žižek:
Explorations
by Shelly Brivic (October 2008)
Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive
edited by Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton (January 2009)
Irish Elegies
by Chris Arthur (June 2009)
James Joyce and the Revolt of Love:
Marriage, Adultery, Desire
by Janine Utell (August 2010)
The Culture of Joyce’s Ulysses
by R. Brandon Kershner (December 2010)
Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W. B. Yeats:
Nation, Class, and State
by Anthony Bradley (June 2011)
Imagining Ireland in the Poems
and Plays of W. B. Yeats
Nation, Class, and State
Anthony Bradley
IMAGINING IRELAND IN THE POEMS AND PLAYS OF W. B. YEATS
Copyright © Anthony Bradley, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-1-4039-7058-9
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-53221-6 ISBN 978-0-230-11954-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230119543
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bradley, Anthony, 1942–
Imagining Ireland in the poems and plays of W.B.Yeats : nation, class,
and state / Anthony Bradley.
p. cm.—(New directions in Irish and Irish-American literature)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Political and social
views. 2. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Criticism and
interpretation. 3. Politics and literature—Ireland—History—20th
century. 4. Politics and literature—Ireland—History—19th century.
5. Nationalism and literature—Ireland—History. 6. Modernism
(Literature)—Ireland. 7. Ireland—In literature. I. Title.
PR5908.P6B73 2011
821(cid:2).8—dc22 2010039994
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
For Patty, Mary, and Patrick
With Love
. . . an Ireland / The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.
—W. B. Yeats,
“The Municipal Gallery Re-visited.”
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
One “Romantic Ireland”: The Early
Poems and Plays (1885–1910) 5
Two Poems, Paintings, and the Newspaper:
Nation and Class in Responsibilities (1914) 27
Three Anglo-I rish Pastoral, War, and Revolution:
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919),
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) 63
Four W. B. Yeats and the Angel of History:
The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and
Other Poems (1933) 97
Five Modernism, Fascism, and Irish Nationalism:
New Poems (1938), Last Poems (1939) 151
Six Taking Its Place among the Nations:
Ireland and Irish Poetry after Yeats 189
Notes 209
Works Cited 235
Index 247
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the editors of the journals in which parts of
this book were previously published for permission to reprint revised
versions of two articles. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was pub-
lished in the Irish University Review Vol. 30, no. 2, Autumn/Winter
2000, as “Fumbling in a Greasy Till: Nation and Class in Yeats’s
Responsibilities.” Parts of Chapters 1 and 3 have been drawn from
my “Nation, Pedagogy, and Performance: W. B. Yeats’s The King’s
Threshold and the Irish Hunger Strikes,” Literature & History, Third
Series, Vol. 18, no. 2, Autumn 2009.
Like everyone now who writes about Yeats, I am indebted to the
plethora of superb scholarship that distinguishes the field. I am espe-
cially indebted to R. F. Foster’s two volume biography W. B. Yeats: A
Life, and to The Collected Letters edited by John Kelly and others, as
well as to earlier biographies of Yeats and editions of his letters. I am
indebted also to the notes and commentary in Daniel Albright’s edi-
tion of W. B. Yeats: The Poems, which I found very helpful. My debt
to these and other eminent scholars, historians, and critics is, I hope,
fully acknowledged in the Notes and Works Cited.
The librarians of Bailey Howe library at my home institution, the
University of Vermont, have been extraordinarily helpful, especially
Pat Mardeusz in Reference, and June Trayah in Circulation. Kristen
J. Nyitray was very gracious and accommodating in providing me
access to the Yeats archive at the Melville Library of Stony Brook
University, New York.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge various debts of gratitude ac-
cumulated over the years; I want to thank faculty at the National
University of Ireland, Galway, where I spent my last sabbatical, for
lively discussion and gracious hospitality, especially Kevin Barry,
Tadhg Foley, and Riana O’Dwyer of the Department of English. I
also want to thank my colleagues at UVM for their intellectual com-
panionship and friendship over many years, especially Jim Holstun
(now at SUNY at Buffalo), whose gifts as teacher and scholar ener-
gized our whole department, and more recently Loka Losambe and
Helen Scott. My closest colleague and friend has been my wife Patty,
who taught American Literature at UVM for almost thirty years, and
without whom I could have achieved little or nothing in life, not even
