Modern Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats to Marina Carr, Second Edition

3. The Literary Tradition

12 The Literary Tradition T H E C E LT IC R E V I VA L A N D T H E C E LT IC T W I L IG H T With Catholic emancipation in the nineteenth century, the Irish people began to look back on their medieval cultural inheritance—the literature and art of the early Christian era—and to reconstruct the past in fine and applied art. Most significant, a renewed pride in the ancient tongue, Irish, revived the use and study of the language and probably saved it from extinction. In music, the sentimental and patriotic lyrics and scores of Thomas Moore contributed to the Celtic Revival, as did the poetry of James Clarence Mangan and the poetry and translations of Samuel Ferguson. The Gaelic League, founded in 1893, promulgated the teaching of the Irish language and, by inaugurating Irish festivals of singing, dancing, piping, fiddling, and poetry recitals, counteracted the feelings of inferiority of many native Irish speakers, who had been indoctrinated into believing that English was the superior tongue and that English culture was more sublime, advanced, and of greater value than Irish culture. William Butler Yeats—Ireland’s greatest poet and arguably, of course, the foremost poet of the English language in the twentieth century—employed the phrase “the Celtic Twilight” as the title of his book of Irish folklore published in 1893, using it to describe the literary and artistic mood in Ireland in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, a romantic mood of shadowy mysticism and mournfulness. This misty view T H E L I T E R A R Y T R A DI T ION | 13 of ancient Ireland—an Irish version of Pre-Raphaelitism—may have been inspired by Matthew Arnold’s 1867 Oxford lecture “On the Study of Celtic Literature.” Although the realists and modernists who came after Yeats reacted against and denigrated Yeats and his followers ’ flowery, self-referential, pastoral, and heavily imagistic poetry, the international public loved this verse and pseudo-archaic tales for the beauty of their language and the power of their sentiments. T H E I R I S H L I T E R A R Y R E N A I S S A NC E The Irish Literary Revival, or Irish Literary Renaissance, a phenomenon coterminous with the Celtic Twilight, grew out of the historical writings of Standish O’Grady, which celebrated the Heroic Age of Ireland for a people thirsty for heroes and heroines. It also was influenced greatly by the nationalist fervor instilled in young writers by that old Fenian John O’Leary, who was released from an English prison in 1884 and returned to Ireland to help educate the younger generation and build an Irish consciousness. Yeats founded the Irish Literary Society of London in 1891 and the National Literary Society in Dublin the next year. He was indeed a great founder—founding the Dublin Hermetic Society first in 1885, then the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897, the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902, and the venerable Abbey Theatre in 1904. Indeed, Yeats was the true father of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Although the writers of the Irish Literary Renaissance worked almost exclusively in the English language, their English was in various ways influenced, inflected, and subverted by underlying Irish linguistic patterns and lexicon. Their work was a remarkable outpouring of world-class literature from a small nation with a tiny population, afloat on the western edge of Europe. This period of high creativity has been given widely differing dates; in a way, the renaissance continues, for little Ireland is very big indeed when it comes to internationally recognized writers (four of them won the 14 | B AC KG ROU N D S Nobel Prize for Literature: Yeats in 1923, George Bernard Shaw in 1925, Samuel Beckett in 1969, and Seamus Heaney in 1995). I offer the dates from 1885 to 1939, the year of Yeats’s death, as workable and useful for the Irish Literary Renaissance, for in the sense of dominating influence Yeats was the renaissance. The writers of the period form a pantheon of literary achievement in poetry, fiction, and drama. Besides Yeats, they include James Joyce (of course), Lady Gregory, Edith Sommerville and Violet Martin (Sommerville and Ross), John Millington Synge, George Moore, Katherine Tynan, George Fitzmaurice, Sean O’Casey...