The Poet As Politician - new biography of W.B. Yeats examines broader context of poet's life - Critical Essay

Reason, Feb, 2001 by Michael Valdez Moses

Yeats' nationalism, like his politics more generally, was never orthodox, no matter how ardently pursued. As behooves a poet, would-be prophet, sometime magus, and political visionary, Yeats had the utmost difficulty adhering to any party line. He intended his brand of cultural nationalism to be an all-inclusive, big-tent movement that would welcome "Protestant and Catholic, Nationalist and Unionist, Parnellite and anti-Parnellite." Nevertheless, by the end of the first decade of the 20th century, Yeats had alienated not only most Protestants, who favored Ireland's remaining within the United Kingdom, but also the great majority of Irish nationalists, who envisioned an independent nation founded upon the twin pillars of Irish Catholicism and Gaelic culture. To his cultural antagonists and political enemies, the most famous Irish poet of the century was simply not Irish enough.

Yet "Easter, 1916," written in the aftermath of the unsuccessful nationalist uprising in Dublin against British rule, is arguably the most famous poem on the subject of Irish politics. Contrasting the gray conformist city of middle-class Dublin before the rebellion with the new world of heroic possibility ushered in by the guerrilla fighters and martyrs of Easter week, Yeats sounds out the names of the new Irish immortals: "I write it out in a verse--/MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and Pearse/Now and in time to be,/Wherever green is worn,/Are changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born."

Much to his subsequent embarrassment, Yeats had spent Easter week of 1916 not in Dublin but visiting the estate of Sir William Rothenstein in Gloucestershire, England. Yeats, like the vast majority of the Irish population, had been less than enthusiastic about the uprising, believing it to have been quixotic, careless of civilian lives, and perhaps even unnecessary. But Yeats quickly revised his view in the wake of the execution of the rebel leaders by semi-secret British court-martial.

In "Easter, 1916" he succeeded in casting himself as the bard who memorialized the Irish dead (many of whom were personal friends and acquaintances). Though physically absent on the days of reckoning, Yeats, through a poetic act of will, had in effect become the voice of Ireland, the militant prophet who named the founding fathers of the new nation.

Ever since 1965, when Conor Cruise O'Brien savaged Yeats for his apparent fascist sympathies, Yeats' political views have come in for much unfavorable scrutiny. Despite an early friendship with William Morris and his lifelong devotion to Maud Gonne, both of whom embraced one form or another of socialism, Yeats detested all forms of communism and Marxism. But like his younger friend and fellow poet, Ezra Pound, Yeats was nevertheless a frequent and vocal critic of what he regarded as the crass materialism of the modern era. Notwithstanding his own entrepreneurial talents and ultimate financial success, Yeats often conceived of Ireland as an anti-materialist haven for premodern spiritual values. Moreover, Yeats was both by temperament and by ideological affiliation a great skeptic of pure democracy. In short, there is much to be said for the thesis that Yeats was a "radical" conservative, a reactionary critic of modern democracy, and a retrograde champion of the values of the old order. It is therefore all the more curious and surprising that Yeats' senatorial career should exemplify the ideals of classical liberalism.