Yeats and Revivalism

Yeats played a crucial part in the Irish literary revival, as well as in the revival for the culture and other Irish writers. In this presentation, the presenter will extract literary materials from early histories of the movement by W.P. Ryan and Ernest A. Boyd; from essays by the poets Patrick Kavanagh and Thomas Kinsella rejecting both Yeats and revivalism; from studies by T. R. Henn, Donald T. Torchiana, W.J. McCormack and Seamus Deane on Yeats’ later identification with the Anglo-Irish tradition; and from Declan Kiberd’s recent survey of Irish literature that sees Yeats as a modern version of the Gaelic poet Aogan Ó Rathaille. The presentation focuses mainly on three parts: (1) With an initial aim to simply get more Irish reader reading Irish books and more Irish writers writing them, Yeats’ evolving role in this literary revival, during which his name was put among “the ranks of the zealous”; (2) Yeats and his post-revivalist obsession with Georgian Ireland as observed by Sligo in Henn’s book; (3) Yeas’ Irish subject matter in his own poetry of the 1880s, an ancient belief in peasant lore that changed little since Adam and Eve