William Butler Yeats

The preeminent writer—and the architect—of the Irish literary renaissance was William Butler Yeats, whose remarkable career encompassed both this revival and the development of European literary Modernism in the 1920s and ’30s. In both movements Yeats was a key participant. While the renaissance gave new life—and new texts—to Irish nationalism in the late 19th century, Yeats aimed to produce a new kind of modern Irish literature in the English language. Toward the end of his life, while he was writing some of his greatest poetry, Yeats wrote of this seeming paradox:

I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser, and to Blake…and to the English language in which I think, speak and write…; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.

Yeats’s career falls roughly into three phases. An early romantic period produced work saturated by folklore, occultism, and Celtic mythology, such as the collection The Wanderings of Oisín (1889) and the play The Countess Cathleen (1892, first performed 1899). The latter, which revolves around a noblewoman who sells her soul to the devil to provide food for the starving peasantry, stirred particular religious controversy among Roman Catholics for what some deemed to be blasphemy. Yeats’s counterversion of that play was Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), which became the central literary moment of the renaissance. In that play—set in 1798, the year of the Irish Rebellion—an old woman persuades a young man to forgo marriage and fight for his country instead; upon leaving the man at the end of the play, she is reported to have been transformed into a young queen, thereby allegorizing the rejuvenation of Ireland by heroic male sacrifice. Near the end of his life, Yeats would write, in reference to the Easter Rising of 1916: “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?”

A mature middle period saw Yeats’s continued preoccupation with the matter of Ireland, particularly during the revolutionary years 1916–23. In 1904 Yeats—with playwright and folklorist Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory—founded in Dublin the Abbey Theatre, one of Europe’s earliest national theaters. For the Abbey, between 1915 and 1920, he wrote At the Hawk’s Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Calvary, published together in 1921 as Four Plays for Dancers. In the first two—and in On Baile’s Strand (1904), The Green Helmet (1910), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939)—Yeats embodies his changing view of Ireland in Cuchulain (Cú Chulainn), the powerful but ultimately maimed hero of Ulster legend. Strongly influenced by the nonrealistic dance-based conventions of the Japanese Noh theater, these plays radically challenged theatrical convention.

Yeats’s vision grew increasingly apocalyptic as he aged. The executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising led to some of his most powerful work, notably the poem “Easter 1916” (1921), in which he marks the transformation of political activists into martyrs and the alteration in his own opinion of them, for all is “changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” The late poems are to some extent his greatest. In “The Second Coming” (1921), “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1928), “Leda and the Swan” (1928), “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928), “Among School Children” (1928), and “Long-Legged Fly” (1939), among many others, Yeats created a body of work in which both the nation-changing events Ireland experienced in these years and his own journey toward old age and death were filtered through an elaborate personal belief system. Outlined in A Vision (1925; rev. ed. 1937), Yeats’s philosophy is an obscure system of gyres and oppositions, with the poet aiming for what he called “unity of being.” This notion of system is crucial to understanding Yeats, for it marked him as essentially Romantic, an heir to the English poet and visionary William Blake. It also differentiated him from many of the other great Modernist poets of the period, for whom disintegration or chaos represented a more seductive aesthetic. In 1923, two years before Shaw, Yeats became the first Irish writer to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature.

John Millington Synge

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The most original playwright of the many given their start by the Abbey Theatre was John Millington Synge. An Anglo-Irish Protestant of means, Synge spent time on the remote Aran Islands, which inspired him to identify the west of Ireland as a site of authentic Irishness. Through his plays he planted this idea firmly at the heart of the Irish literary renaissance. In the one-act plays In the Shadow of the Glen (first performed 1903) and Riders to the Sea (1904) and the three-act The Well of the Saints (1905), the language, character, and humor of the Irish peasant, not least the female peasant, were rendered in a manner that broke with earlier comic depictions by Charles Macklin, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and others. But it was with his darkly comic masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World (1907)—based on a story he had overheard in western Ireland—that Synge gave the fledgling national-theater movement its most explosive moment. The Playboy, Christy Mahon, is a young man who claims—falsely, it turns out—to have run away from the family farm after killing his father with a spade. Rather than provoking outrage, Christy becomes a local hero, especially to the local women who clamor for his sexual attention. The play’s bawdy irreverence and its perceived insult to the piety of Irish Catholic womanhood offended nationalists. In 1907, during the play’s second performance at the Abbey, the use of the word shift (to refer to a girl’s undergarment) provoked a riot; subsequent performances were plagued by protests and disorder.