In Our Time - Yeats and Irish Politics

Episode Date: April 17, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the poet W.B. Yeats and Irish politics. Yeats lived through a period of great change in Ireland from the collapse of the home rule bill through to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the partitioning of the country. In May 1916, 15 men were shot by the British government. They were the leaders of the Easter Rising – a doomed attempt to overthrow British rule in Ireland - and they were commemorated by W.B. Yeats in a poem called Easter 1916. It ends with the following lines: MacDonagh and MacBrideAnd Connolly and PearseNow and in time to be,Wherever green is worn,Are changed, changed utterly:A terrible beauty is born.Yeats lived through decades of turbulence in Ireland. He saw the suspension of home rule, civil war and the division of the country, but how did the politics of the age imprint themselves on his poetry, what was the nature of Yeats’ own nationalism, and what did he mean by that most famous of phrases ‘a terrible beauty is born’?With Roy Foster, Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University and Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford; Fran Brearton, Reader in English at Queen’s University, Belfast and Assistant Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry; Warwick Gould, Director of the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of London

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In May 1916, 15 men were shot by the British government. They were the leaders of the Easter Rising, a doomed attempt to overthrow a British rule in Ireland,

and they were commemorated by W.B. Yates in a poem called Easter 1916. It ends with the following last. minds. McDonough and McBride and Connolly and Pierce, now and in time to be, wherever green is worn, are changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Yate lives through decades of turbulence in Ireland. He saw the suspension of home rule, civil war and the division of the country. How did the politics of the age imprint themselves on his poetry? What was the nature of Yates' own nationalism? And what did he mean by that famous phrase, A terrible beauty is born? With me to discuss W.B. Yeats and the Politics of Ireland, Roy Foster, Carole Professor of Irish History at Oxford University and Fellow of Hartford College, Oxford. Fran Brierton, reader in English at Queen's University of Belfast, an assistant director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry,

and Wari Gould, Director of the Institute of English Studies in the School of Adults, University of London. Roy Foster, W. W.B. H. William Butler E. H. William Butler E. was born in Dublin in 1865 into the Protestant upper middle class. How did you remember of the so-called Protestant ascendancy get involved in a largely Catholic world of Irish nationalist politics? Well, if nationalism is about belonging and authenticity and to a certain extent compensation,

I think all of these apply to Yates' position, he's okay, he's ascendancy, but he's kind of fringe ascendancy. He's de classé, the family, his father's a bohemian. He dislikes the ruling structures of boring, stifling, Unionist, Protestant, Dublin, Sligo, his kind of Ireland. He's also trying to answer the question, which a lot of people are trying to answer over the next generation of how to be authentically Irish and not Catholic.

So in a sense, nationalism is for him that kind of answer. He's also a very intelligent and autodidactic young person in the 1880s who is seeking out a kind of framework to live by. and he chooses nationalism as well as occultism as a way again, I think, of avoiding that too easy identification of Irishness with Catholicism. Did he go about it, as it were, one might say, first, culturally? Yes, in the sense that cultural independence from Britain

was to him a priority, and the great question as to whether cultural independence could come without political independence or might even be a necessary precursor to political independence was something that will be at the centre of his enterprise, I think, in a sense, for the rest of his life. We talk about the Irish literary revival,

the Irish Renaissance. Can you give us some details of the way that the young Yates set about this in his own work? Well, the way one interprets it is inevitably seen in the light of the way Yates later interpreted it. I think it's very important not to see it entirely from his point of view, because when he writes about this,

he's writing after the Irish Revolution, which ends more or less in 1921, and he's looking back at the 80s and 90s and saying, this is where it all began, this is what I did, this is how it happened. He's imposing a teleology, which I think isn't really there. The cultural revolution, according to Yeats,

begins after the hopes for a constitutional home rule solution end with the death of Parnell in 1891, and then people turn aside to culture and the culture radicalises them and they become revolutionaries. actually the cultural revival precedes Parnell's death actually the idea of cultural enterprise

of the little clubs and everything that are burgeoning around Dublin in the 80s are built on the expectation that Home Rule will come not that I think a revolution will come Can you just tell us a bit about the expectation for Home Rule and explain Charles Pinell and his place in it? Home Rule was the idea that Ireland could devolve, have autonomous

The economy devolved unto itself in a kind of Canadian-type way, but remain within the British Empire and probably remain represented in Westminster as well. It was, if you like, a safe middle option, which had the advantage that it could technically have kept Protestant Ireland on board if they had the sense to see that, which they didn't. This was the version of Irish nationalism, which Yates's father embraced and which the very young Yates embraced as well,

When the great leader of the Home Room Movement, Charles Stewart Parnell, fell from power after a divorce scandal and then died amid the wreckage of his party and hopes in 1891, that's a key moment in Irish politics. Yates would say it's a key moment in Irish culture as well, but I'm not as convinced by that. Brian Brayton, can we see Yates political ambitions in the poetry and plays of this early period? And can we just again, we didn't quite flesh that out.

He's going into folk history, he's going down in Sligo. He's rooting around to get at the roots of the Irish, what the Irish literature, Irish culture means. Yes, I think so. The very early poems, one wouldn't look at them and immediately say here is, you know, the work of some kind of Irish nationalist. You know, there are fairies and druids.

And there's a certain sentimentality or idealising of Ireland, I think, partly because Yates is for much of that time actually living in London, so in a sense he's pining for a kind of island of his youth and you do see a sort of sentimentalising of the West of Ireland, say, in Lake Island's free and very well-known poems like that. But he is also going back to Irish mythology. He's introducing heroic figures such as Kuhullin. Those figures are going to become very important

in burgeoning a sense of Irish culture and an independent from England, Irish culture, more importantly, I think. I hope I pronounce this correctly, Kathleen Nehulahan. Now, can you tell us about the figure that he made of her and why that was so important?

I mean, he makes them, there's a wonderful poem, Red Han Rahan's song about Island where he puts Kathleen Nehulahan there is the inspirational figure, the embodiment of Ireland in the guise of a woman, which of course is a very typical thing

to do in all kinds of nationalist ideologies so that the male revolutionary, if you like, will then sacrifice himself for the love of this beautiful woman. It's there in that early poem. It's also there, of course, in the play, Kathleen Nehulahun from 1902, where his inspirational figure, who is moored gone

and who's the inspirational political figure for him as well in the 1890s is playing that title role of luring men on, if you like, to their sacrificial death in the cause of Ireland. Can you tell us a little more about Kathleen Nehulahan? And were the real, based on, can you just give us more? Well, oddly, just before the rising, I think they sent around a memo to remind people

that there was, in fact, no such person as Kathleen Nehulahom, who was summoning people to die. There are other equivalents, you know, Britannia would be worn, of course, in terms of the British Empire. And drawing on some of those figures from myth is a way in which I think Yates can, without being overtly political,

can nevertheless create a sense of cultural unity and inspiration, or at least that's his ambition in that early period in the 1880s and 90s. And he would be very explicit in a poem like, say, to Ireland in the coming times, very explicit in saying that what I do is in the service of the nation. Now, to some extent, you know, he's pleading his kind of credentials as the nation's island's national poet at a very early stage, I think. But also at a very early stage, you use the word sacrifice, and that comes in Kathleen, the Huland when it's obviously quite a young one now. It is. I think it's there in some of those early poems and certainly in the play. The heroic ideal of sacrifice is something that interests him. Of course, when that's played out much more literally some years later,

it qualifies his view of the earlier period as well. What briefly were his poetic influences? He's coming. It's really in those early poems, out of an English romantic tradition to some extent, and out of the influence of people like Keats Shelley, particularly William Blake and of a kind of revolutionary romanticism from that earlier period

and recapturing some of that at the end of the 19th century. He's also very implicated in French symbolism in the decadence movement in the idea of art for art's sake but I think in Yates' case art for art's sake is also art for islands' sake because it's about that cultural enterprise

that Roy was talking about. Orriggul at this time we've talked about I've mentioned the Irish Liter Renaissance You characterise that's an attempt to rescue Irish literature, to revive it, to reinvent it, and did that go hand in hand with its political activism? Well, I'd like to call it at this stage the Irish literary revival. The reason being that there's another tradition, apart from the tradition that Fran Briotton has just mentioned, which Yates sets out to revive, to nuance, to change, to complicate, but to embed himself in.

and when he says in an early poem such as to Ireland in the coming times, nor less may I be counted one with Davis, Mangan, Ferguson, he's touching the buttons that his Irish audience will understand. Davis, of course, because of the Young Ireland movement, the battle cry of the nation, as Yates puts it, Mangon, the heroic cry of despair, and Ferguson, who he calls the one Homeric poet of the late 19th, century, who brings us into the presence of the immortals still fresh with the dew of the primal

world. And it's a conscious attempt to put himself into an Irish tradition. But it's an Irish tradition, the poetry of which, bluntly, he wishes to improve and to change and to turn to other causes. When Roy mentioned the declining in Protestant world of Dublin in the 1880s. It is a moment in 1885 when Yates turns to revolutionary politics. He joins the Irish Republican Brotherhood. It is a physical force movement. And he accepts that, what, six years before the fall of Parnell,

four years before he's met more gone, there is a dedication to a notion of apocalyptic change which does inflect the poems of the succeeding 10 years and it completely changes the ways in which he acts and works in politics. You mentioned Mord Gond. She became an immense influence in his life, as I understand it. She was an heiress, an actress, a beauty, a nationalist, and quite violent in her extreme political opinions,

much more violent than he was, and yet he was infatuated with her, he was obsessed with her, he proposed to her three times, and he went on for her. Can you just place her rather more carefully than I've done? Well, you've done it pretty well. What more can be said about that without going into, you know, into the blow-by-blow accounts

or failed love of her? She actually did take him, she took him more firmly into an area, which you say he was pretty, dispersed again anyway? Well, she becomes, of course, an icon of that movement. But if we go back to the idea of revival and the point that Roy mentioned about the necessity, the growing necessity of a cultural revival after Pinal Falls, one can see all sorts of different

patterns emerging there, but the key one is the growing desire to celebrate the centenary of 1798. And at the same time, a desire to protest against Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1897. And in those movements are as complicated

and as faciparous as one can imagine, but in all of them, Morgon takes an iconic lead. The 1798 is the time when we were, England, England, was at war with France and the French sent troops to help the Irish

to rebel and it was England difficult as Ireland's opportunity again, and the British put it down brutally and to celebrate it and so on. He began to lose his faith in the nationalist movement. And in this poem in 1913, he declares Romantic Islands dead and gone. It's with O'Leary in the grave. Who was O'Leary, and why was he using L'Leary there? Well, one has to look, John O'Leary, the... The Fenian leader who had, of course, been imprisoned and then exiled and had come back to Ireland at the end of that period of exile.

A great reader of Irish literature and Irish fiction, a noble and heroic figure in Yates's view, a man who said that there are things one should not do to save a nation. And Yates idealised him, there's no question about that, read what he, O'Leary told him to read, could not bear to go to his funeral in 197 because it was going to be, the funeral would be an occasion for a kind of nationalist frivolity which Yates himself felt he could not share.

And that's a remarkable change from 10 years earlier when Yates had stood in Phoenix Park and said that the cause of Irish nationalism was a high and a holy cause. So why, briefly, why did he drop this cause then? Why he moved on for it? I think that's a question you need to ask Roy.

Ireland. Ireland had moved on. Thank you, Warwick. There's a number of things that have happened. I mean, we've taken a great leap ahead. The high point of Yates' nationalism is, I think, the 1890s centennial movement. 1798, enormously important in the nationalist imagination. And by the way, the play Kathleen Hulahan is set in 1798 about the French coming.

But what happens just after that, is that Yates becomes involved in the theatre movement, becomes involved in a kind of cultural politics where he is looking for nuance, for the avant-garde, for subtlety, not for the simplicides of Fienian nationalism. He says about O'Leary, when he writes about him later, that he had the moral simplicity, which does for one's life,

what style does for one's words, it stamps it. But he had moved beyond that. He had also become disillusioned with, Fianianism for a personal reason, because Maud Gahn had married a Fienian, John McBride. It had a disastrous brief marriage and a terrible separation from him. The Fienian movement had sided with McBride and denounced Maud Gond. And so, yet, had all sorts of reasons for disillusionment with radical nationalism by 1907, I think. And Macbred took part in the Easter Rising on 24th of April 1916.

It's a very important event in modern Irish history. Can you explain briefly why? that happened and what the consequences were? 1916 was a Fenian rising. Fenian ideology always said England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity. A foreign war was when you had a rising as the night followed the day.

The First World War gave the green light to plan a Fenian rising with German aid, a very important part of the plans. German aid didn't come at the end. A minority of the plotters went ahead and had this, we come to the word, sacrifice again, rising to re-ignite Ireland's nationalist soul and also to put paid to the Home Rule

Movement, which was in abeyance during the war after the great difficulty of Ulster refusing to accept a Home Rule bill that had passed. So you have a sudden moment in 1916 when radical phenom nationalism returns to the centre of the stage and Yates has to reposition himself and get back, if you like, behind the kind of national. which his poetry of disillusionment, as he himself called it, of the previous decade, at least, had been turning against. And what happens to Yates and Irish nationalism in step with each other from 1916 is radicalisation in a separatist direction.

Is this because of the British reaction? Can I turn to you, Fran, Britain, is this because of the British reaction to the Easter Rising, which the 15 men were shot? Now, in some of your notes it's saying after a brief trial, there was no trial, which was it? After a brief trial, I think it would be correct. The problem is they were done

over a lingering period of two weeks. So where the rising itself may not have been, and of course wasn't a military success, it was put down relatively quickly, its casualty rate is in proportion to what's happening on the Western Front, relatively small. It's a few than 500. What matters to the public imagination then

is the martyrdom in effect of those people executed by the British over that two weeks, which really turns the tide of public opinion, which may have been slightly apathetic, I think, towards the rising at the point where it occurred, but suddenly becomes much more in favour. Never put better than by Yates himself in his poem, 16 dead men, because he's including Roger Casement, where he says, oh, but we talked at large before the 16 men were shot, but who can talk of give and take, what should be and what not, while those dead men are loitering there to

stir the boiling pot. That's what's happened after the executions. And because after that he wrote Easter 1916, one of his most famous poems. You want to say a little to that, Franbury, and then perhaps read a few lines. Easter 1916 has begun hard on the heels of the rising, and it's a poem where he's working out very much his own reactions to it as well as trying to create, you know, the elegy for that event. It's a poem that wasn't published immediately, not for several years. In fact, it was seen at the time, certainly by Mauda gone, as not wholly adequate. You know, she wanted more straightforward, I think, praise for what had happened in the rising.

But it's a poem full of the ambiguities of the political context out of which the rising emerges about what the future might be. And there are some difficult questions asked in it. You know, the very famous lines, Too Long, A Sacrifice Can Make a Stone of the Heart is raising a question. about the kind of nationalist ideology that led to the rising. And then perhaps some more difficult questions come, was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith for all that is done and said, we know their dream, enough to know they dreamed and are dead.

And what if excess of love bewildered them till they died? It's a poem that's probing some very difficult issues about the rebels in 1916, and not giving easy answers to them. Let's stick with this period in the middle of the First World War. How did Yates, on the whole, respond to the war? As Franz said earlier, he lived a lot of his time in London. He had English friends and so on and so forth.

He was Protestant descendants and so on. How did he react to the First World War? He felt that he had to steer a very careful line. There's no question about where his allegiances lay, although he framed those in studiously neutral terms. Can you just explain to the listeners where his allegiances did lie? Well, his allegiance lay with the Allies. There's no question about that. We never criticised Germany, do you?

No. But he called the Allies them, I think, as Fran has pointed out. And it was a kind of neutrality that he felt a poet had to maintain. and indeed in a famous poem says that in times like these we poets should keep our mouths shut, he says, in the draft form. It's important also to say that Eastern 1916, of course, is written on the coast of France in September 1916 when he's Tang with Maud Gond. That he is a man who's obsessed by the Irish. question rather than the larger questions of the First World War. I think

that has to be, I think that has to be said. Can we just go a little more into this? Because it's a fascinating there were a lot of Irishmen fighting in the trenches. I don't know, numbers. It's 150,000, suppose, and something like that, and about

40,000 were killed. So that was going on as well which we don't hear very much about. How was that affecting the situation of Yates and national... It's interesting, isn't it? Because I take Orick's point to was obsessed more with the Irish question than with the broader European stage, and yet the First World War is the Irish question in terms of the number of people it's affecting. And there is perhaps a difficulty that, you know, the real cataclysmic event from one point of view in Ireland in 1916 is

the loss of thousands on the song from both the Irish and the Ulster divisions. And the dead from that war are by and large silent in Yates's writing. He pushes it as far as he can, I think, to one side. And as you say treads very carefully around it. And after the Easter rising, of course, that becomes even more complicated because you have huge numbers of Irishmen serving in the army that then executes the 1916 revolutionaries. And that causes, in a sense,

such cultural and political turmoil that the subject itself becomes silenced in a way, not talked about, because it's too difficult to talk about it. As Fran mentioned, but Roy Foster, Easter 1916 was written then, but it wasn't published until 1920. So is he manoeuvring his position in that time?

What is going on? It's circulated in a kind of Sammstadt way among friends. It would be read rather crudely, and I absolutely agree with France, that it's full of ambiguity and nuance. But it would be read crudely as endorsing the ship, what is now called the Sinn Féin rebellion. So he keeps it quiet,

partly because he's trying to negotiate with Lady Gregory to get a collection of French impressionist paintings that were left to Ireland in an unwitness codisosos. by Hugh Lane, but are being grabbed, I think, very unjustly by the National Gallery of London. His correspondence shows this. He won't be able to deal with British politicians to try and negotiate the return of these paintings to Ireland if he is seen publicly as a Sinn Féin supporter.

So that's one very practical reason. Yates operates on various political levels, and one of them is the political level of the grand world, which by now he's very at home in. So that is a very practical reason. But there is also the fact that nobody knows what way the cat is going to jump. Home rule may be, the chestnuts may be pulled out of the fire. England may keep faith for all this is done and said. After 1918 with the landslide election with Sinn Féin win,

with Home Rule finished as an option, with alienation from Britain increased greatly in Ireland by the attempt to conscript Irishmen to fight in the war. After 1918, things are different. After the Anglo-Irish war begins in 1990, things are different again. But Yates is waiting until quite a late. stage and when he comes out as a Sinn Féin supporter it is in, of all places, the Oxford Union where he is making a speech and that's the first public statement where he endorses

the Irish Revolution in 1920. And at that stage he publishes, as he tends to do, publishes a clump of political poems. Eastern 1916, 16 dead men, the rose tree to a political prisoner, all come out in the dial in 1920 with the second. and coming. And it's a very, very clear deployment, if you like, to a political purpose. Deployment is perfect because that's exactly what he's doing. And many of his most famous poems and ostensibly most direct poems

like an Irish airman foresees his death have underneath the surface a very distinct political impetus where he is rewriting history against the actuality of what is happening. I'd come back to that in one second, right. I just wanted to pick up the second coming that Warwick mentioned in this clump of poems. This, again, is full of lines that people, that run through people's heads.

Can you just place it there? Yes, I can, because the lines that people never get to read of this poem are the lines where Yates began. In a manuscript, he begins, after the lines about the falcon, cannot hear the falconer, The Germans are now to Russia come, though every day some innocent has died, the mob to fawn upon the murderer and so on. It's a war poem, and it begins with the opening up of the Russian Front. So this is where some of those apocalyptic visions that you find in the poems of the 1890s are suddenly deployed again on the First World War.

It's a war poem, but it's also a Russian Revolution poem. And I think it has to be placed in his view of the cracking apart of the European world at the end of the war, which to him fits into a system of historical cycles, which by then he's becoming preoccupied by. But this is things fall apart. Yeah. In another sense, it's a poem about the breakup of empire, that idea that the centre cannot hold. And the idea about the best and the worst is something he talks about when the First World War itself begins, that this is the sacrifice of the best by the worst.

You know, there are ideas that circulate throughout those periods. I don't think one could ever pin the poem down to any specific historical event. Why did you take out the Germans or Russians more, you know? It became a different poem in the process of its own writing. Like later and swine. Indeed. And it becomes, of course, a better poem, a bigger poem, a less occasional poem. That's the point.

A more visionary poem. And until one ends, of course, you know, with a... with the rough feast. Roy began to talk a few moments ago, and I'd like to concentrate for a few minutes, if you would, on the poem, an Irish airman foresees his death. Wonderful, comparatively short poem,

apparently very simple, apparently idealised, and he'd like a poem written to remember the son of his friend, Augusta Gregory. But what, so what's the poem really saying? It's a little tricky, isn't it? Well, lines like, those that I fight, I do not hate, or those that I guard, I do not love. My country is Kiltartan Cross, my contrarment Kiltartan's poor.

This is no law, nor duty about me fight, nor public men, nor cheering crowds, a lonely, impulsive delight. He seems to be, I mean, since I've been reading what you three have written, it's become a much more politically charged poem than I ever thought it was. It's politically charged by virtue of trying to eliminate certain politics from its fabric. And oddly enough, one finds it anthologized in First World War anthologies in that early period of 1914 idealism, but of course this is a 1918 poem and it isn't doing that. It's taking out of Robert Gregory's enlistment in the Royal Flying Corps the political motivations that Yates finds too difficult to deal with. Gregory did not go to war because of some lonely impulse of delight

to become a Shakespearean tragic hero in a kind of suicide mission. That isn't what's happening, but it's the way Yates can make him into this heroic figure, the kind of knight of the sky who dies in combat willingly. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I'm just going to say, I was just saying to Roy, after you finish, would he come in and dig a bit deeper into this one? Well, the poem's also...

I was just doing it in mind, that was all. The poem's also a gift to his old and closest friend, Augusta Gregory. It's because she more or less ordered him to write elegies for her son when he was tragically killed in the war. This is much the most successful of him, I think. But he's...

He's writing about somebody who was from the landowning ascendancy, as Yates himself was not quite, who hated Sinn Féin, who was actually rather imperial in his values. Robert Gregory, though he was an artist, he was also a fairly standard upper-class young Anglo-Arishman who believed in empire. Yates, as France said, is writing this in 1918. Things are very sensitive for Lady Gregory,

Robert's mother in her estate in the West of Ireland. Yates, by displaying her... son in this role is integrating the Gregory family into Ireland. My country is Ciltharton Cross. My countrymen, Cil tartan's poor. Actually, they were also their, you know, tenants. But he's creating an Irishness. And it's back to this question of a search for authenticity, a search for being authentically Irish without being Catholic. And he's putting the Gregories into that role here as well. But the interesting, can I just press this a bit? Because I find it, sorry, to take my own taste,

a little bit further. But it's fascinating, what is he not saying in the poem? What is he avoiding saying directly? I mean, you've already said he's avoiding saying that this young man is fighting for a cause outside his own, idealised as it were, medieval knightly cause. So he's avoiding saying this man is on one side, or so he's avoiding saying that this man belongs to this part of Ireland. He's saying this man is Irish, not British. That's what he's saying.

Which is actually, I think, in terms of Gregory's own self-identity, completely inaccurate, but it is what it is politically helpful to emphasize for people like the Gregories and for people like Yates himself at this very sensitive moment in political time. I think it's putting Yates into the aircraft, actually. Those I fight, I do not hate, those I guard, I do not love those negatives, all brought in the end to this curious point of balance in the last four lines with that famous poetic device of chiasmus.

The years to come seem waste of breath, a waste of breath, the years behind, years, breath, breath, years. And that sense of balance, I think gestures to Yates' own adroitness and poise in positioning himself in the midst of all of these political cross currents. Yes, the identification of Yates with that Nietzschean feeling is important. when he writes, just a couple of years later, remembering how when Maudaun first radicalised him and he was swept up in the Jubilee riots of 1897,

which Warwick mentioned earlier, he writes, I felt the excitement of the mood, the joyous irresponsibility, the sense of power. And a lot of what Yates is looking for are those self-liberating feelings, which he is attributing here to Gregory,

but which he searches for himself because they're, well, there are a well-spring for public, poetry, among other things. I think he's also saying that Gregory is not a victim, and in view of the way we tend to think about certainly the First World War of a number of people who are passively kind of suffering in that war. He's also giving him the kind of individualism that the war takes away. What he does sometime later in the little poem reprisals, which was never published in Yates' lifetime, is completely unright. An Irish airman foresees his death,

and he describes Gregory at that point as one of the cheated dead, which is much more what we would expect in relation to. And Leisure Steele, he'll say that passive suffering is not a proper subject for poetry. Of course, and therefore excludes Wilfred Owen from his anthology. Yes, he cut, it doesn't like the war poets

that we celebrate so intensely now are cut out of his anthology completely, and he's rather... He says that Owen is all blood, dirt, sugar stick. It's not many of it would agree. Well, I would... I would...

I would want to play devil's advocate there and say that perhaps the reason why Yates is so hostile to Owen is that the young dead Owen imitated the young Yates which Yates in 1936 was not so keen on.

That doesn't stop him being a good poet. I think he also doesn't like the way Wilfredone is appropriated by a 1930s generation and politicised. We've got a lot of business to do. Right. Roy, in 1921 after a war between the British, I'm and the Irish Republic, there was an Anglo-Irish treaty. Can you give us that and how it moved. Sorry about this, but that's the deal.

And how it affected Yates is poetry. The Pemican version of Irish history. Yeah. There is a treaty. It gives 26 counties of Ireland, not the six northeastern counties which stay in the UK, but it gives the 26 counties of Ireland autonomy. Not actually that's difficult from a more extreme version of the old home rule idea. They're still in the empire, but they have their own government. And the new Irish political establishment takes. power because the Irish Revolution has been

a revolution against the old home rule generation as well as against the British. There is a new post-revolutionary elite in power. Yates is taken up by them. He makes friends with a few of them, not many. He joins the Senate. He becomes what he will call a smiling public

man. But nationalism, as I said earlier, isn't a fixed thing and one shouldn't see it as a sort of teleology. Nationalism itself changes. Nationalism becomes in a sense the establishment. now in the 1920s. And Yates begins, I think, to react against it, much as he reacted against the stifling

unionist establishment of his youth. And he sees the very clerical, very Catholic, very conservative ethos of the new Irish free state in the 20s. Increasingly, he sees that as something to be resisted, struggled against, subverted. And that comes through, that subversion enterprise comes through, I think it's some of his greatest poetry of the late 1920s. As he's become a senator now, we can talk about his personal politics more.

It takes us into that area for own Britain. And he was by no means a Democrat. He was a believer in eugenics. Can you develop those two points? It's interesting whether one can always identify those politics from the poetry directly in that period. Yates is permanently embattled figure, and I think Roy is suggesting that, you know, that he becomes, you know, again, his own government as it hardens in. particular ways, but he believed, and I think consistently in not perhaps an autocratic

politics as such, but certainly in the idea of an oligarchy government by the elite, now who constitutes that elite, is perhaps open to question. The artists, the aristocrats, these make up part of a Yatesian ideal society. But just to get it clear, I mean, this isn't to decry him or anything, just to get it clear. He is not by any means a Democrat. We just might as well get it clear. One of the difficulties for me is that Yates at no point professes a belief in democracy. He says the opposite, that he is anti-democratic and that his vision is anti-democratic. As a politician, as a public figure, I think he's rather different from that.

So that if you look at certain arguments Yates is making while he's in the Senate, we would actually be very sympathetic to some of those arguments which are in a sense resisting the notion that church and state will dictate the way people live their life. lives. So whether he's a more democratic figure politically than he would ever advocate for himself is another matter, I think. So what he can profess can be very difficult to read. How he lived is perhaps another matter. The consistency in Yates's thought is an intrinsic belief in freedom of thought and an absolutely consistent opposition to censorship. And I think that's very important because though he is as one of his friends who was, I think,

a paraphastist, Captain Dermot McHanis said emphatically, Yates was not a fascist, but he was an authoritarian. He did believe that democratic forms had failed in many places, but he always believed in the absolute freedom of thought for the individual and the artist, and that isn't really compatible with fascism. No, but I'm just going to stay here for one moment, then we'll move on, but he was very sympathetic to

and friendly with the ideas of Ezra Pound. he was a fan of Mussolini. I'm talking from the notes from the stuff you've read. I mean, I just think it should be faced up to. But Melvin, he was very friendly with Ezra Pound, but he thought many of Ezra Pound's political ideas were bonkers. He was close to Pound personally.

He believed in Pound as an artist. He did not share Pound's politics in the sense of being personally committed to the Italian and fascist cause. Yates lived in Italy in the late 20s and took curiously little interest in what was going on in Italy politically. Italian poets who went to see him were struck by this, that he might as well have been living in Dublin one of them. Take a deep breath facing

three Yatesians. What about eugenics then, Warwick Gould? Well, I think we would have to ask several questions about eugenics. One of which would be that there were different kinds of eugenicists at the time and the other would be to

suggest just how prevalent it was as a mode of intellectual thinking. On left as well as right? On left as well as right, yes. To come back to what Roy was saying and Fran about Yates' political mindset,

it is that he commends, he does commend the rule of the able and the educated. There's no question about that. And that, therefore, he remains attracted by intellectual fashions and intellectual and political fashions and I think this explains why it is that he sometimes finds himself

poetically experimenting in the service of a cause from which he will subsequently withdraw. So there is a moment of enthusiasm for the kind of blue shirts in Ireland in 1933, a sort of summer of madness where he's very excited that they can't just make the shirts fast enough to keep up with demand. But a distancing after that as well. And I think one of the difficulties with attaching either a label fascist or with talking about Yeats and Eugenics is that our view of that is now coloured

by the experience of Nazi Germany and World War II. And it is very difficult to think back to, as Warwick is saying, an intellectual climate in the 20s and 30s, where many of the ideas were talked about, we're current, we're not necessarily as sinister at the time as we now perceive them to be. Very fair point. I think we needed to bring it up, but I'd like to end on this later poem. When After he'd been ill and retired, Man in the Echo. Roy, can you, we haven't got much time, I'm afraid, but what is important about that poem in Yates's poetic development and his political development?

At the very end of Yates's life, he goes back to his beginnings. He reflects on what he has done. He goes back, in fact, to Irish ballad forms and ways he goes back to Irish myths. he asks himself what the influence of all he did had come to. He lies awake at night, Oldendale, and asks the essential question, what have words of mind sent out certain men, the English shot. He is looking, in a sense, yet again,

to position himself in Irish history. He's asking the questions of himself that we now ask, how important was the cultural input into the radicalisation of Irish? British politics and how important was Yates in that cultural input. Other poets have looked at this, Paul Muldoo notably, and rather laughed at asking this question. I think it's

a relevant question and I think the answer to it is a qualified yes. The Irish revolution would not have happened in the way it happened without all Yates brought to the party. Which is what T.S. Eliot meant when he

said about Yates being part of the history you wrote? Yates' life being the history of his own times. And Yates' friend, Stephen Gwynn, who was at the first production of Kathleen Nahulahun, played by Maud Gond, said, I went home asking myself if such plays should be produced unless one were prepared for people to go out and shoot or be shot. And there's no question that both Yates and Gwyn thought that had been the effect of the play. Well, thank you all very much. Roy Foster from Brayden, Warwick Gould.

Next week we're talking about materialism in philosophy. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.