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  • “Emblems or Symbols, Not Pictures”: W. B. Yeats and Free State Coinage Design
  • Rob Doggett (bio)

It’s 3 a.m. at Doheny & Nesbitt, a favorite watering hole of Dublin’s political and business elite, and the property tycoon Sean Dunne stoops to retrieve a penny from the pub’s grimy floor.

One would think that Mr. Dunne, Ireland’s best-known building developer, would be in bed at this hour. It’s a weeknight, after all, and he has meetings that begin before first light.

What’s more, the Irish economy, pummeled by the most severe housing bust in Europe, has collapsed. And the gossip around town is that Mr. Dunne, whose brazen deal-making and Donald Trump–like lifestyle epitomized the country’s euphoric boom, might be going bankrupt.

But, no matter, a penny is a penny.

New York Times, 4 January 2009

If a notorious Irish property developer bends down to retrieve a penny from a Dublin pub floor, does it matter what’s represented on the coin? For W. B. Yeats, whose time in the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928 included chairing the committee responsible for designing his newly independent nation’s coinage, it certainly would. Although Yeats’s senate career is perhaps best known for his scathing indictment of a bill that effectively outlawed divorce in the Irish Free State, much of his tenure was devoted to legislation concerning material representations of Irish culture: monuments, museums, the stained glass and lace industries, the location of state buildings, judicial robes, and, his most lasting achievement, coinage design. Believing that true national unity following British rule could only be accomplished [End Page 87]


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[End Page 88]

“by creating a system of culture which will represent the whole of this country and which will draw the imagination of the young towards it,” he consistently stressed the need to preserve, create, and promote “visible signs” of his nation’s distinctly Irish ethos (Senate Speeches 76, 73). Dublin’s “monuments,” he explained, “will become of great importance to this country [for] the education of our own people”; judicial robes no longer modeled on British tradition will help “the people to realise that the law is now their own creation, their own instrument”; and the new coinage design, formally adopted in 1928 and in circulation until 1971, will “be such that even the humblest citizen will be proud of it” (Senate Speeches 77; 116; 95).1 Had he lived to witness Sean Dunne stooping to retrieve a coin now bearing the marks of the one-cent Euro, Yeats would likely have considered the penny a material indication that his nation had ultimately failed to capture the imagination of the young and, perhaps, that his worst fears about the rise of materialism and bourgeois economic opportunism had come to pass.

For Yeats was, as most scholars are quick to note, profoundly antipathetic toward the deadening forces of materialism and bourgeois commercialism, forces which, in certain moods, he perceived as the defining features of European modernity, that “filthy modern tide.”2 As early as 1901, during a dispute with John Eglinton over the current state of Irish civilization, Yeats opined that “the decadence he has described is merely the modern way, because it is the English way, because it is the commercial way. Other countries only share it in so far as they are commercial” (Later Articles 57). Significantly, Yeats, who was always quick to see culture as the basis of civilization, consistently eschewed any strictly materialist reading. He chose instead to characterize bourgeois commercialism as an epistemological position, a mode of, to use one of his favorite pejoratives, “abstract” consciousness that manifests itself in the greed of the marketplace, newspaper rhetoric, and political or religious dogmatism. Thus, when referencing the term “middle class” one year earlier in an [End Page 89] essay for The Leader, he immediately added, “I use the word to describe an attitude of mind more than an accident of birth” (Later Articles 49). This tendency to see commercialism as an attitude of mind, rather than as a system of commodity exchange inextricably connected to social class, remained a central feature...

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