YEATS AND THE IRISH TRADITION

‘Irish poets, learn your trade,’ enjoins Yeats, in one of his last poems, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, which is something of a last will and testament. One of the things this poem does, as befits such a testament, is to convey Yeats's own sense of where he himself belonged in the tradition of Irish poetry, as well as his sense of what was best in that tradition. But of what tradition are we speaking? Many readers outside Ireland, especially in Britain, possess only the vaguest notion of what an Irish poetic tradition might be, if indeed they realize that such a thing exists at all. This last point of ignorance is less common in the USA and Europe, where there is often a tendency to romanticize Ireland and her mysterious Celtic past, even where there is little detailed knowledge. But in Britain, ignorance fed by prejudice can still permit a columnist in The Times, supposedly a paper for educated people, to deride the notion that there could be anything of value in the study of the Irish language, dismissing it as fit for nothing more subtle than pub discussions of racing form and the scores of hurling matches.

Yeats did not know Irish, and his efforts to acquire it met with as little success as his efforts to acquire other languages. He avowed that, though Irish was his national language, English was his mother tongue. Yet it is central to a true understanding of Yeats, and of other writers of the so-called Irish Revival, that there had grown up, since the early Middle Ages, an extensive, rich, and various literature in Irish, comprising – among other genres – epic sagas, romances, and lyric poems. Some of these writings are transcriptions of oral traditions with their roots in the pre-Christian Iron Age. A vital part of the inspiration of Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Lady Gregory is bound up with the idea of revival in a fairly precise sense: the revival, albeit in the English language, of a power, a pathos, and a corpus of myths and legends, which had once found embodiment in the Irishlanguage tradition. For many people of Yeats's background (he came from the Protestant middle class), the idea that such a tradition had existed was almost as new and outlandish as it is to many modern English people.