Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature1 (1892)
When I come over here from London or cross over to London I am always struck afresh by
the difference between the cultivated people in England and the cultivated people—alas! too
few—here in Ireland. They could not differ more if they were divided from each other by a
half score of centuries. I am thinking especially of the men of my own age, though not
entirely of them. In England amongst the best minds art and poetry are becoming every day
more entirely ends in themselves, and all life is made more and more but so much fuel to
feed their fire. It is partly the influence of France that is bringing this about. In France a man
may do anything he pleases, he may spend years in prison even, like Verlaine,2 and the more
advanced of the young men will speak well of him if he have but loved his art sincerely, and
they will worship his name as they worship Verlaine's if he have but made beautiful things
and added a little to the world's store of memorable experiences. The influence of France is
every year pervading more completely English literary life. The influence of that school
which calls itself, in the words of its leader, Verlaine, a school of the sunset, or by the term
which was flung at it "as a reproach, and caught up, as a battle cry,” Decadence is now the
dominating thing in many lives. Poetry is an end in itself; it has nothing to do with thought,
nothing to do with philosophy, nothing to do with life, nothing to do with anything but the
music of cadence, and beauty of phrase. This is the new doctrine of letters. I well remember
the irritated silence that fell upon a noted gathering3 of the younger English imaginative
writers once, when I tried to explain a philosophy of poetry in which I was profoundly
interested, and to show the dependence, as I conceived it, of all great art and literature upon
conviction and upon heroic life. To them literature had ceased to be the handmaid of
humanity, and become instead a terrible queen, in whose services the stars rose and set, and
for whose pleasure life stumbles along in the darkness. There is a good deal to be said in
favour of all this. Never before, perhaps, were men so anxious to write their best—as they
conceive that best—and so entirely loth to bow to the prejudices of the multitude. There is
much to be said even for Verlaine, for he who writes well and lives badly is usually of more
service to the world at large than he who writes badly and lives well, and he is always better
than the crowd who do both indifferently. But one thing cannot be said. It is not possible to
call a literature produced in this way the literature of energy and youth. The age which has
produced it is getting old and feeble, and sits in the chimney-corner carving all manner of
curious and even beautiful things upon the staff that can no longer guide its steps. Here in
Ireland we are living in a young age, full of hope and promise—a young age which has only
just begun to make its literature. It was only yesterday that it cut from the green hillside the
staff which is to help its steps upon the long road. There is no carving upon the staff, the
rough bark is still there, and the knots are many upon its side.
When I talk to people of literary ambition here in Ireland, I find them holding that literature
must be the expression of conviction, and be the garment of noble emotion and not an end in
itself. I found them most interested in the literary forms that give most opportunity for the
display of great characters and great passions. Turning to our literature I find that such forms
are plenty, often absolutely crude and uninteresting, as in the case of McCarthy's “Fardiah,”
and Joyce's “Blanid;” occasionally crude and interesting, like Joyce's “Deirdre,” and
Ferguson's “Congal;'' and once or twice beyond all praise and all imitation like Ferguson's
“Conary," and his better known 'Vengeance of the Welshmen of Tirawley."4 But side by side
1 Published in United Ireland in October 1892, this article reflects the growing tension between Yeats’s aspirations for a distinctively
Irish literature and his continuing investment in the Decadent and “Art for Art’s sake” aesthetics current in 1890s England. Having
broken with the Arnoldian idea that art should be “a criticism of life,” he here resists the idea that Irish writing should be animated
by Nationalist convictions and aims and tries to find a middle ground between a purely literary art that has “ceased to be the
handmaid of humanity” and an art that is merely didactic or utilitarian and hence commonplace or careless.
2 Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), French poet and aesthete who had spent two years in prison after shooting his lover, poet Arthur
Rimbaud (1854-1891), and who promoted the aesthetic of “Art for Art’s sake.”
3 The Rhymers’ Club, a group of young poets and writers who met regularly in a London pub in the early 1890s to discuss literature.
4 “Ferdiah: An Episode from the Tain Bo Chuailgne” by Denis MacCarthy (1817-1882); “Blanid” and “Deirdre” by Patrick Weston
Joyce (1827-1914); the epic poem “Congal” and “The Vengeance of the Welshmen of Tirawley” by Sir Samuel Ferguson (18101886). Yeats here picks out writers using Irish mythological and heroic material as the inspiration for their work. Joyce specialized
in collecting and publishing Irish folk songs. Ferguson was in Yeats’s view the most accomplished Irish poet post-1850. See note 3 to
with this robustness and rough energy of ours there goes most utter indifference to art, the
most dire carelessness, the most dreadful intermixture of the commonplace. I have before me
a letter from a young man in a remote part of Ireland asking an opinion about some verses
and telling me, as if it was a special merit, that he did them at great speed, two columns in an
hour, I think. I have not yet read his poems; but it is obvious that good poetry cannot be done
in this fashion. There is a printed letter of John Francis O'Donnell's, in which he claims to
have written I know not how many columns of verse and prose in two or three days.5 Yet, he
who would write a memorable song must be ready to give often days to a few lines, and be
ready, perhaps, to pay for it afterwards with certain other days of dire exhaustion and
depression, and, if he would be remembered when he is in his grave, he must give to his art
the devotion the Crusaders of old gave to their cause and be content to be alone among men,
apart alike from their joys and their sorrows, having for companions the multitude of his
dreams and for reward the kingdom of his pride. He who would belong to things eternal must
for the most part renounce his allotted place amid the things of time. Here in Ireland the art
of living interests us greatly, and the art of writing but little. We seek effectiveness rather
than depth. We produce good correspondents, good journalists, and good talkers, and few
profound and solitary students. “You Irish people/' said a witty woman to me once, “will
never have a future because you have a present/' “We are/7 said a famous Irishman to me,
“too poetical to be poets, we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks, we are a nation of
brilliant failures/'6 I no more complain of this absorption in mere living than I complain of
the narrow devotion to mere verbal beauty of the newest generation of literary men in France
and England. We have the limitations of dawn. They have the limitations of sunset. We also
in the coming centuries will grow into the broad noon and pass on at last into twilight and
darkness.
Can we but learn a little of their skill, and a little of their devotion to form, a little of their
hatred of the commonplace and the banal, we may make all these restless energies of ours
alike the inspiration and the theme of a new and wonderful literature. We have behind us in
the past the most moving legends and a history full of lofty passions. If we can but take that
history and those legends and turn them into dramas, poems, and stories full of the living
soul of the present, and make them massive with conviction and profound with reverie, we
may deliver that new great utterance for which the world is waiting. Men are growing tired
of mere subtleties of form, self-conscious art and no less self-conscious simplicity. But if we
are to do this we must study all things Irish, until we know the peculiar glamour that belongs
to this nation, and how to distinguish it from the glamour of other countries and other races.
“Know thyself' is a true advice for nations as well as for individuals. We must know and feel
our national faults and limitations no less than our national virtues, and care for things Gaelic
and Irish, not because we hold them better than things Saxon and English, but because they
belong to us, and because our lives are to be spent among them, whether they be good or
evil. Whether the power that lies latent in this nation is but the seed of some meagre shrub or
the seed from which shall rise the vast and spreading tree is not for us to consider. It is our
duty to care for that seed and tend it until it has grown to perfection after its kind.
“To Ireland in the Coming Times,” p. 21.
5 Yeats had reviewed the collected poems of John O’Donnell (1837-1874), negatively, the previous year.
6 In The Trembling of the Veil, Yeats ascribes this saying to Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), playwright, poet, and critic.