(Minor Field) The Poetry of William Butler Yeats

RATIONALE In reading Yeats' poetry, I wish to investigate the contrapuntal relationship between culture and the politics of state formation. If Yeats began his career with the conviction that a cultural revival could reinvigorate or perhaps even replace the Home Rule political movement, his writings after the Irish Free State came into existence are much more politically critical and almost disengaged. What were the shifts in both nationalist politics and Yeats' aesthetic and political philosophy that made the nationalist poet of the Literary Revival the skeptical poet of Irish modernism? I wish in particular to look at Edward Said's argument, that Yeats' decolonisation poetics was also and crucially broadly liberationist. The Irish independence movement may have been broadly liberationist also, as David Lloyd has stressed, but the state that resulted was not—it was the state of a conservative counter-revolution. In what ways did the political developments in Ireland impact upon Yeats' poetry? How can a liberationist poet reconcile himself to his disappointment in the state that he had imagined and heralded. Where precisely does a cultural movement that allies itself with a political cause diverge from that cause? To what extent was the Literary Revival a naïve movement that was blind to the increasingly Irish and Roman Catholic nature of the political movement? What does this divergence between the principal figure of cultural nationalism and the political nationalist movement say to the relationship between culture and politics, and why does it happen at precisely the time that the aim of decolonisation seems closest? These are some of the questions I wish to trace through the poetry of W.B. Yeats. To me, they speak clearly to the clash at the moment of state formation, between the heterodox movements that allied in the political and military struggle, and the orthodox claims of the resulting nation-state. The imposition of an unfragmented chronology of state formation appears to be the moment of statist violence that is of most concern to Yeats, and it is the rawness of both military and political violence that seems to force his poetry to step away from its close involvement with the national project and withdraw into the body and the mind as the sites of historical experience and regeneration.

PRIMARY READINGS WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS — Crossways (1889) — The Rose (1893) — The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) — In the Seven Woods (1904) — The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) — Responsibilities (1914) — The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) — Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) — The Tower (1928) — The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933) — Parnell's Funeral and Other Poems (1935) — New Poems (1938) — Last Poems (1939) — Additional poems from The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats. Volume I: The Poems (ed. W. J. Finneran)

SECONDARY READINGS Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler — Gender and History in Yeats' Love Poetry — Yeats, Ireland and Fascism Foster, Roy — W.B. Yeats: AaLife. Volume I: The Apprentice Mage Howes, Marjorie — Yeats' Nations: Gender, Class and Irishness Said, Edward — Yeats and Decolonisation