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Deep- Rooted Things DeeP- Rooted ThingS Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of Rob doggett , © 2006 University of Notre Dame Press Copyright © by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Excerpt from “Exposure” in Opened Ground: Selected Poems, ‒ by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Yeats excerpts reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from: The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol. Autobiographies, edited by William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald. Copyright © , by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © , by Anne Yeats; The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol. Later Essays, edited by William H. O’Donnell. Copyright © by Michael Yeats; The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol. The Irish Dramatic Movement, edited by Mary Fitzgerald and Richard Finneran. Copyright © by Anne Yeats; The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol. Later Articles and Reviews, edited by Colton Johnson. Copyright © by Anne and Michael Yeats; Essays and Introductions by William Butler Yeats. Copyright © by Mrs. W. B. Yeats; Explorations by William Butler Yeats.Copyright © by Mrs. W.B. Yeats; Memoirs, edited by Denis Donoghue. Copyright © by Michael Butler Yeats and Anne Yeats; Mythologies. Copyright © by Mrs. W. B. Yeats; The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, edited by Russel K. Alspach and Catherine C. Alspach Copyright © by The Macmillan Publishing Company. Copyright © by Russell K. Alspach and Bertha Georgie Yeats; AVision by William Butler Yeats. Copyright © by W.B. Yeats; copyright renewed © by Bertha Georgie Yeats and Anne Butler Yeats. (excerpts of poems): “Easter, ”; “A Prayer for my Daughter” in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright © by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © by Bertha Georgie Yeats. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”; “All Souls’ Night”; “Among School Children”; “From ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ ”; “Leda and the Swan”; “Meditations in Time of Civil War”; “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”; “On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac”; “Sailing to Byzantium”; “The New Faces”; “The Three Monuments”; “The Tower”; “Youth and Age” in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright © by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © by Bertha Georgie Yeats. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”; “Fragments”; “Vacillation” in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright © by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © by Bertha Georgie Yeats. “Meru”; “Parnell’s Funeral”in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright © by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © by Bertha Georgie Yeats. “Cuchulain Comforted”; “Lapis Lazuli”; “Reprisals”; “The Black Tower”; “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”; “The Man and the Echo”; “The Municipal Gallery Revisited”; “The Statutes”; “Three Marching Songs”; “Under Ben Bulben,” in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright © by Georgie Yeats; copyright renewed © by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats. “A Coat”; “Adam’s Curse”; “Fergus and the Druid”; “Red Hanrahan’s Song about Ireland”; “The Hosting of the Sidhe”; “The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water”; “The Phases of the Moon”; “The Sad Shepherd”; “The Song of the Happy Shepherd”; “To Ireland in the Coming Times”; “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time”; “Who goes with Fergus?” in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, ). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Doggett, Rob, ‒ Deep rooted things : empire and nation in the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats / Rob Doggett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. -: ---- (pbk : alk. paper) -: --- (pbk : alk. paper) . Yeats, W.B. (William Butler), ‒—Criticism and interpretation. Nationalism in literature. Yeats, W.B. (William Butler), ‒—Political and social views. .Politics and literature—Ireland— History—th century. I. Title. '.—dc ∞This book is printed on acid-free paper. © 2006 University of Notre Dame Press IntRoduction I thought ‘my children may find here Deep-Rooted things,’ but never foresaw its end —W.B. Yeats, “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited” One cannot sum up a nation intellectually. —W.B. Yeats, Memoirs Deep-Rooted Things examines Yeats’s shifting relationship with the discourses of British cultural imperialism and Irish nationalism during Ireland’s transition from colony to (partially) independent nation in order to provide new, histori- cally grounded readings of his poetry and drama. It demonstrates how Yeats’s writings represent a thoroughgoing and often conflicted response to the multiple and competing formulations of identity, nationhood, and history central to these discourses and to the broader pressures, ambiguities, and paradoxes of (post)- coloniality. Focused on the key historical events that he witnessed and on the nationalist movements that he both embraced and resisted, Deep-Rooted Things reads the core features of Yeats’s aesthetic program, his tendency to reinvent himself as an artist and to privilege contradiction over resolution, as repeated attempts to provide in art a foundation for national unity throughout this pe- riod of transition or national crisis. Exactly how Yeats responds to the events and movements that he witnessed—from the expansion of cultural and militant nationalism during the late s and the Abbey Theatre conflicts of the early s, to the Easter Rising (), Anglo-Irish War (‒), Irish Civil War (‒), and consolidation of the Irish Free State—varies widely, as he never remained content for long with one specific political or aesthetic posi- tion. Yet, it is precisely this willingness to change, this tendency toward fluidity and even internal contradiction, that makes Yeats such a compelling figure. And it is this multifaceted Yeats, this poet and dramatist whose art gives voice to a © 2006 University of Notre Dame Press Introduction violent, divided, tragic, and, at times, heroic (post)colonial Ireland, that Deep- Rooted Things seeks to reveal. By emphasizing a multidimensional and conflicted Yeats, my work fol- lows the lead of some recent scholarship, most notably that of Marjorie Howes, whose important and insightful book, Yeats’s Nations, demonstrates the extent to which the poet’s conceptions of “nationality” and “Irishness” are contin- gent upon “specific configurations of gender and class.”1 While my own study touches upon similar questions of class and, in particular, gender, it differs from Howes’s by reading the divergent nationalist stances that emerge in Yeats’s poetry and drama as rooted directly in his continued attempts to negotiate the political, economic, and cultural conditions of Irish (post)coloniality. At the same time, Deep-Rooted Things departs substantially from the majority of cur- rent works devoted to the “postcolonial Yeats.” Although I incorporate post- colonial theory with an eye toward the unique features of the Irish context, I have sought to move beyond the usual question of how or why Yeats can be properly considered a postcolonial writer. In part, this is because other critics, such as Jahan Ramazani, have skillfully responded to the question; and, in part, because the question, most recently addressed in the collection W.B. Yeats and Postcolonialism, often produces strained readings designed either to adopt Yeats into the now fashionable club of Third World writers or to attack him (once again) for his sometimes conservative political stances.2 Resisting the prevail- ing desire to hang a positive or negative label on Yeats’s political and national- ist commitments, I have aimed to tease out the diverse features of those com- mitments as they emerge in his art by privileging complexity over political value, internal instability and contradiction over consistency. I have also sought to break new ground by challenging and reconfiguring the postcolonial theoretical paradigms that have informed much of the recent scholarship, particularly the almost ubiquitous reliance upon Frantz Fanon. His cogent remarks on the pitfalls of nationalism and his distinction between a re- gressive “national consciousness” and a progressive “political and social con- sciousness” are certainly applicable to the Irish context.3 We need only recall the Irish Free State’s censorship of film and literature, bans on divorce and contra- ception, and at times brutal suppression of dissension to recognize the dangers of an insular national consciousness that persists in the aftermath of colonial rule. Yet his theories, when applied broadly to Yeats, have the tendency to limit our perspective. While Fanon himself, as I discuss in chapter , is careful to dis- tinguish among different forms of nationalist resistance, the Fanon lens tends to inscribe a form of binary thinking. As a teleological narrative of decoloniza- tion that posits, in the words of Edward Said, a progression from “nativism” to “liberation”—from a nationalist stance that remains fixated on “local identity” and communal “essences” to an alternative stance that embraces “a more gener- © 2006 University of Notre Dame Press Introduction
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