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

In general, Yeats favored the free exchange of intellectual and artistic products across national borders. With the exception of his support for measures designed to shield the fledgling Irish stained glass industry from foreign competition, Yeats inclined toward a doctrine of free trade--especially when it involved forms of international cultural exchange.

Most famously, Yeats spoke with great passion against an early attempt to abolish divorce in Ireland. Yeats' ringing and at times caustic rhetoric in defense of the rights of the Protestant minority constitutes his most memorable speech in the Senate: "I think it is tragic that within three years of this country gaining its independence we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation considers to be grossly oppressive. I am proud to consider myself a typical man of that minority. We against whom you have done this thing are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.... If we have not lost our stamina then your victory will be brief, and your defeat final, and when it comes this nation may be transformed."

Alas, Yeats' rhetoric only served to inflame sectarian passions and failed to persuade his fellow senators. It is a pity, because elsewhere in his speech Yeats articulates a powerful and more broadly appealing reason to reject the proposed measure: It will make less likely the unification of the south and north of Ireland.

Yeats' defense of what he elsewhere referred to as "the liberty of minorities" and his excoriation of "fanaticism" reveal the liberal basis for his conception of Irish nationalism. Though his rhetoric may well have inflamed rather than dampened sectarian passions at the time, Yeats nonetheless articulated a principle of toleration, liberty, and the protection of religious and political rights that would make possible the unification of a diverse and culturally heterogeneous Irish people.

Brown gives rather little attention to Yeats' career in the Senate, but dutifully attends to Yeats' fascination with Italian fascism and his nearly lifelong hostility toward mass democratic politics. He draws attention, for example, to Yeats' brief enthusiasm in 1932 for Gen. Eoin O'Duffy's notorious, if short-lived, "Blueshirts," a paramilitary organization of Irish ex-servicemen that assumed fascist trappings. In fairness to his subject, Brown also notes that in 1929 Yeats took the trouble in print to warn his friend Ezra Pound against his enthusiasm for Italian fascism. Moreover, Brown suggests that in 1924 Yeats may well have played a small role in heading off a military coup d'etat against the fledging Irish Free State.

Brown argues that Yeats' infatuation with the Blueshirts grew out of the poet's "boredom with bourgeois democratic politics" and his "relish for drama, vitality, the heroic, the irrational, passion." Brown observes, however, that Yeats' very resistance to conformity and his love for agonistic struggle would almost certainly have soon made him an outlaw in any truly authoritarian regime.