“Half-read Wisdom”: Classics, Modernism and the Celtic Fringe By Gregory Edward Baker A.B. University of Chicago, 2003 A.M. Brown University, 2009 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2013 © Copyright 2013 by Gregory Edward Baker This dissertation by Gregory Edward Baker is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Kenneth Haynes, Dissertation Director Recommended to the Graduate Council , Date~)2~113 ~ B--e~ I , Mutlu Blasing, Reade; f\ (. ' j, -'-+---I---d ~G ~/[~7--. David Konstan, reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date----- Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii For Ciara – Through Aoife ________ I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth In something that all others understand or share; But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth A company of friends, a conscience set at ease, It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy, The half-read wisdom of daemonic images, Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy. – W. B. Yeats, “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1923). Cosb yw cau dyn oddi wrth wlad ei eni,- hynt oer mewn tir na wyr Ladin iaith. It is cruel to keep A man from his native land, A cold crossing in a place That knows nothing of Latin. – Euros Bowen, “Cerdd Ofydd” (1981). iv Curriculum Vitae Gregory Baker was born on November 11, 1980 in Warwick, Rhode Island. After graduating from Cranston High School East in 1999, he went on to study classics at the University of Chicago where in June 2003 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors. Working with professors D. Nicholas Rudall and Christopher Faraone, Gregory wrote his undergraduate thesis at Chicago on Greek elegy and Homeric reception in the poetry of Theognis of Megara. In the autumn of 2005, he enrolled in the graduate program of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Since that time, while completing the requirements for a doctorate, he has worked as a teaching and research assistant for professors Mutlu Blasing, Geoffrey Russom, Meera Viswanathan, Arnold Weinstein and Kenneth Haynes. v Acknowledgements Many have contributed to this dissertation. I would like to thank the staff of the Rockefeller Library at Brown University, as well as the staffs of the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, and the British Library, without whose help many essential pieces of scholarly interest would have gone unnoticed. I am grateful to Thomas Dilworth for his careful critique of chapter four, and to Nicholas Elkin, Sarah Williams and the David Jones Estate for allowing me to print both David Jones’ inscription, Cara Wallia Derelicta, as well as the 1960 address Jones gave in absentia to the University of Wales. Further thanks are due to Siwan Jones and the Saunders Lewis Estate for allowing me to reprint the pamphlet, Is There an Anglo- Welsh Literature? as well as other rare but important articles by Lewis. Most especially, I would like to thank my colleagues past and present in the departments of Comparative Literature, Classics and English at Brown University—all of those who have contributed to the depth and scope of my graduate research and training. Foremost among these are Nora Peterson, Brian Ballentine, Philip Walsh and Arnold Weinstein. My dissertation committee members, Mutlu Blasing and David Konstan, patiently read and improved the research and the writing of each chapter here. It was, moreover, in their classes—through their teaching—that I began to adumbrate some of the matter of this thesis. My greatest debt is to Ken Haynes. Without his good example, his unflinching criticism and his generosity of spirit, the words here would have remained just a small flame. vi Table of Contents Epigraph iv Curriculum Vitae v Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 I. “A noble vernacular?”: Yeats, British Hellenism & the Anglo-Irish Nation 12 II. “Hellenism—European Appendicitis”: Joyce, Antiquity & the Genesis of the ‘Cyclops’ 56 III. “Straight talk, straight as the Greek!”: Ireland’s Oedipus & the Making of Modernism 101 IV. “Heirs of Romanity”: Welsh Nationalism & the Multilingual Idiom of David Jones 155 V. “A form of Doric which is no dialect in particular”: the Cosmopolitan Classicism of Hugh MacDiarmid 207 Appendix I 252 Appendix II 264 Bibliography 285 vii 1 Introduction For the real Gael has something which the old Greeks had… He has a craving for essentials. The miracle of literature, Of culture, in racial history, Is that it is at once the bow and the mark, The inspiration and the aim. – Hugh MacDiarmid, “Credo for a Celtic Poet” (1967).1 The “half-read” knowledge of classical and Celtic languages exerted a major ideological impact on the development of political and linguistic nationalisms in twentieth-century Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.2 This partial understanding of ancient language also exercised a dominant influence on major forms of Modernist literary expression—forms which arose as part of a complex reaction to the impulses that motivated ‘nation-building’ in the Celtic countries of the British Isles. From the Irish Literary Revival onwards, classical precedent was often cited and invoked in diverse attempts to examine and confront English influence in the political, literary and religious life of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Conscripted into varying ideologies of cultural 1 Hugh MacDiarmid, “Credo for a Celtic Poet”. Agenda, Double Issue: Hugh MacDiarmid and Scottish Poetry (Autumn–Winter 1967) Vol. 5.4–6.1, 12–15: 15. 2 The phrase, “half-read wisdom”, I borrow from the final couplet of W. B. Yeats’ “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1923). The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, eds. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1957) 417–27: 427. 2 nationalism, Greek and Roman civilization was set out as an authoritative model for emulation—a model which legitimized the social and linguistic purification of the modern Celtic nation. No lesser figure than the Irish poet and mastermind of the 1916 Rising, Pátrick Pearse, put it well when contrasting the superior genius of the Gael with that of the Saxon: What the Greek was to the ancient world the Gael will be to the modern; and in no point will the parallel prove more true than in the fervent and noble love of learning which distinguishes both races. The Gael, like the Greek, loves learning, and he loves it for its own sake.3 Similarly, Douglas Hyde, the president and founder of Ireland’s Gaelic League, insisted that the Gaelic peoples of the British Isles were—despite the rampant spread of English speech—the last living remnant of the civilization which first “established itself in Greece”, a civilization which was now making its “last stand for independence in this island of Ireland”.4 And yet, this connection between the classical and the Celtic—what J. M. Synge once described as a “Greek kinship”—was not only exploited in attempts to de- anglicize nationality throughout Ireland, Scotland and Wales.5 It was also pervasive in the experimental and multilingual forms which became characteristic of twentieth-century modernism. Having emerged in response to the political manipulation of the classics, these forms of literary expression sometimes promoted, and at times skeptically interrogated, the vision of antiquity advanced by the ideologues of Celtic nationalism. 3 P. H. Pearse, “The Intellectual Future of the Gael” (October 1897). Three Lectures on Gaelic Topics. (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1898) 46–59: 46, as quoted in Fiona Macintosh, “The Irish Literary Revival and the Classical Tradition”. Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994) 1–18: 1. 4 Douglas Hyde, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” (25 November 1892). Language, Lore, and Lyrics: Essays and Lectures. Breandán Ó Conaire, ed. (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1986) 153–70: 155. 5 J. M. Synge, “Celtic Mythology” (2 April 1904). Collected Works, Volume II: Prose. Alan Price, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) 364–6: 365. 3 With this in mind, this dissertation investigates specifically how this polyglot impulse of modernism as it emerged in Ireland, Scotland and Wales arose through a largely untutored, unschooled knowledge of both classical languages and Celtic civilization. In so doing, it shows how the “lack of direct access to classics”—through a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin—was no impediment to the radical formal innovation which developed in high modernism.6 Even though W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid, remained largely ignorant of both classical and Celtic languages, the “half-read” knowledge of ancient world which they acquired acted as a powerful motivating force on their work—a force by which they fostered new idioms of literary expression, a force which was a “positive incitement to engage classical texts in new ways.”7 At the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of English as a field of scholarly interest and academic study brought with it the slow decline of liberal education in the classics.8 Once the hallmark of public schooling across the British Isles, Greek and Latin were no longer afforded what one Cambridge classicist called “the lion’s share which has been theirs in the past.”9 At the same time as English began to supplant both Greek and Latin, nativist movements calling for Gaelic and Welsh language purity gained greater popular favor across Ireland, Scotland and Wales.