According to the source below, Yeats expressed his ambivalence towards Irish nationalism in the poem "September 1913." While he tried to restore Irish culture and literary traditions as an exercise in nationalism, he did not endorse violence as a way to achieve political freedoms for Ireland. Instead, he sought, through the Irish Literary Revival, to revive the sense of Irish culture as a route to nationalism. His conception of Irish nationalism was that it was a intellectual and cultural movement fought with the pen rather than an overtly political movement fought at times with guns.
In the poem "September 1913," Yeats derides the middle-class nationalist Irish movement, which he describes in the following way: "And add the halfpence to the pence / And prayer to shivering prayer, until / You have dried the marrow from the bone." He feels that the middle class is mainly concerned with earning money and with saying prayers until they have sucked all of the life out of Ireland. He says that have made Ireland into something dead, similar to a bone that has had all the marrow removed from it.
The vitality of Ireland, in Yeats's eyes, lies in the past, not in the future. He writes, "Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave." John O'Leary was an Irish nationalist who had already died by 1913. Yeats wanted to revive the Gaelic history of Ireland, what he referred as "Romantic Ireland," but he was not committed to a political revolution to gain Irish freedom from Great Britain.
Source:
Hale Kiyci. "Yeats’ ambivalence towards Irish nationalism in 'September 1913' and 'Easter 1916.'" Procedia—Social and Behavioral Sciences 158 (2014), 119 – 123. 14th International Language, Literature and Stylistics Symposium.
Saturday, August 19, 2017
How does the poem September 1913, relate to the context of Irish nationalism during the years of the Irish Literary Revival?
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