WB Yeats’s Nobel Prize: 100 years on, who is to take charge of our national literature?

One hundred years ago this month William Butler Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was awarded for “his always inspired poetry, which in highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. Yeats understood the prize’s political as well as literary significance, commenting, “I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature. It is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.”

In his acceptance speech he stressed that his achievement was part of the Irish revival’s collective effort: “Thirty years ago a number of Irish writers met together in societies and began the remorseless criticism of the literature of their country. It was their dream that by freeing it from provincialism they might win for it European recognition.” Acknowledging the generational contribution, he concluded, “when I return to Ireland these men and women, now growing old like myself, will see in this great honour the fulfilment of that dream”.

Several striking things here. First, the idea, then unremarkable, that a great writer could give “expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. Second, Yeats’s ready acknowledgment that his achievement reflected a sustained, collective, 30-year drive to refine a national literature to win the highest esteem. Third, his observation that this ambition had required “the remorseless criticism of the literature of their country”, meaning an unsparing attention to its weaknesses, the better to remedy them.

A national literature? A century later, how much do people still believe in such a thing? What conviction does it carry for writers or for publics? Does it persist mostly as historical curiosity rather than as purposeful part of the present? Or, if it has still a real function, who now takes charge of a national literature and is responsible for its flourishing? We have institutions to promote Irish historical houses and estates – such that it sometimes seems as if the ascendancy, in its old and new versions, might yet outlive Yeats and the national literature he helped renovate. But are there equivalent institutions for enhancing and advancing a national literature?

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In some European countries the cultivation of a national vernacular literature began as early as Dante. Cardinal Richelieu established the Académie Française in 1635, and it is still charged with conserving the French language as well as overseeing annual prizes for literature, theatre, poetry, cinema and history writing. The English have Poets’ Corner, in the southern transept of Westminster Abbey in London: since Geoffrey Chaucer was buried in its east wall, it has served as an honorary burial ground for writers from Edmund Spenser (1599) to John Masefield (1967). More lately, the transept appears to have run out of room – or perhaps the idea of a national literature just ran out of steam. Still, the Americans opened a Poets’ Corner in the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York in 1984, a Scottish Poets’ Corner was founded in Edinburgh in 1999, and Canada had established its own version in 1947 on the University of New Brunswick’s campus; one imagines it is less tight for space.

If academies or monuments are one means to honour high literary achievement, national canons were another. They were supposed to winnow the best from the rest, the better to highlight the finest literary achievements from the past for the sake of the present. Canons always cohabited with forms of antiquarianism, archival collection and literary history, which aimed to preserve everything, so that as little as possible of the national heritage was lost. So the idea that canons are the fixed paper equivalents of stone monuments is mistaken, because new aesthetic tendencies, the flourishing of new genres (such as the novel) or new social movements regularly unsettled established canons. As John Guillory observes, “as some literary works sank into obscurity, they did not disappear altogether but suffered some ambiguous fate of preservation. Those works in the shadow of the canon could always be rediscovered, even moved back into the canonical sunlight.” The most prestigious writers or works rarely suffer much reshuffle or relegation – though critics such as TS Eliot would occasionally tilt even at a Milton, Shaw daring to break a lance on Shakespeare.

If canons were merely the design of literary academics, they would probably have less social impact than venues such as Poets’ Corner or the Panthéon in Paris, which at least attract millions of tourists annually. But national canons typically evolve by more complex processes, and their most obvious social impact is by way of secondary school and university curriculums, where students encounter some of their country’s greatest literary works in the classroom. Some nations attribute pre-eminence to one writer or work, and these become national cultural icons. England had Shakespeare, Spain Cervantes, the Italians prescribed Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1827) as a national text for a period; the Americans, more informally, accord some such status to Moby Dick (1851) or The Great Gatsby (1925). Great modern poets such as Goethe, Whitman, Tagore, Faiz Ahmad Faiz or Mahmoud Darwish have become revered national figures. Scandalous ones have proved hard to accommodate. Lord Byron had to wait a century and a half for his Poets’ Corner plaque; the American Poets’ Corner still excludes Ezra Pound.

A new nation emerging today might find its highest artistic expression in cinema rather than in literature

So, given their one-time significance, why have national literatures and national canons suffered a decline? Or have they only appeared to do so?

Contemporary academics are generally warier of the concept of national literatures than were their predecessors some generations ago. In the English-speaking world, the American upheavals of the 1960s brought a salutary unsettling. Second-wave feminism, black-power and African-American civil-rights campaigns, Native American and queer movements stimulated scholarship that radically overhauled existing literary canons, the US one consolidated only since the 1920s and largely middle-class, white-male and northeastern in focus. This post-1960s scholarship was certainly progressive in many respects and produced curriculums more reflective of American demographic realities. It was easier to devise more inclusive canons than to create an equitable society to match, however, and the creation of more inclusive canons has run concurrent with the creation of a radically unequal and rancorously divided society. If the United States offers a lesson, it might be that unless accompanied by wealth redistribution and social justice, more liberal and multicultural canons or literatures do little to create a better nation.

[ The story about WB Yeats’ bones being sought from a French ossuary inspires French writer ]

National literatures’ reduced status is mostly attributable to literature’s changed place in new media ecologies. Most countries consolidated national literatures and their institutionalised study considerably later than France or England did; the process occurred nearly everywhere in tandem with late-19th- and 20th-century drives for mass literacy when women, peasants and workers were first recognised as national citizens. Literary works then enjoyed for a century or more a special place in the wider repertoire of cultural forms that cultivated national identity and sensibility. Music had a special role in some nations, but, because mass literacy was required for work and everyday life, literature enjoyed advantages that painting, music or opera could not.

Nation-states remain committed in principle at least to mass literacy, but the most spectacular developments since the second World War are in largely visual forms – cinema, TV, video games, social media – and literature no longer enjoys its earlier pre-eminence. Moreover, as corporate conglomerates increasingly control the internet, literary publishing, cinema, music-streaming services, social media and so on, national markets are competitively nested within global, regional, ethnic, youth and niche markets. In short, globalisation, decentralisation, diversification, digitalisation and the proliferation of new media challenge literature’s one-time representational dominance. A new nation emerging today might find its highest artistic expression in cinema rather than in literature. The English, adept at preserving and popularising national heritage, have transferred swathes of their national literary canon from page to screen: Shakespeare and Marlowe, Austen and Dickens, Hardy and Woolf, Mantel and McEwan have all enjoyed magnificent remediation.

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Does this mean that national literatures are now like romantic or puritan Ireland, effectively dead and gone? Probably not. Nation-states remain the most viable modes of political participation and large-scale affective community; the recent pandemic demonstrated that different forms of nation-state organisation and different senses of national belonging and culture fostered quite different public responses to extended crisis. Nevertheless, Ireland in 2023 faces challenges of a different order to those it confronted in 1923, when Yeats won his Nobel Prize.

For one thing, both jurisdictions on the island remain, post-Brexit, part of the European single market, and the Republic is a full member of the European Union, which is still struggling to articulate its own sense of collective belonging by literary and other means. Unlike the United States or China, the European Union is not a federal or centralised nation-state, and there is no common canon of “European literature”. As the United States has overhauled its national literary canons to attend more to its ethnic diversity, it has slowly been turning away from Europe – for a long time its automatic interlocutor – and adjusting its position to look eastwards to the Pacific and China, Africa and Latin America.

When Yeats received his Nobel Prize, in 1923, Ireland had recently been partitioned. Now, in 2023, many consider Irish reunification to be on the agenda. Here, matters of national literature and culture become more salient

Against this backdrop, the European Union has sponsored conferences to consider whether a supranational “European literature” is possible. Robert Schuman, one of the architects of what became the European Union, declared towards the end of his life that were he starting the process of European unification all over again, he would begin with culture rather than economics. Recognising that the European Union lacks the instruments to promote a common supranational sense of “imagined community”, the Schuman Foundation and other European-integrationist bodies attempt to advance such agendas.

The terms by which any European literary canon might be constructed, let alone become widely accepted, remain elusive but would certainly require some complex co-ordination of linguistic, national and federal heritages. Whatever one’s take on such matters, it would be foolish to think that national literatures or canons have ceased to matter in either the United States or the European Union. Reactionary right-wing campaigns against more liberal models of imagined community are now being fomented across Europe and the United States; stoking “culture wars” has indeed become indispensable to contemporary authoritarianism. In contrast, the left has been slow to offer compelling alternatives to such reaction or to liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism and is therefore sometimes caught in the crossfire.

When Yeats received his Nobel Prize, in 1923, Ireland had just recently been partitioned; now, in 2023, many consider Irish reunification to be on the agenda. Here, too, matters of national literature and culture become more salient. In 1973 Thomas Kinsella published The Divided Mind, an essay reflecting on the differences between Irish and English poetic heritages. A contemporary English poet, Kinsella wrote, can feel at home in the long tradition of English poetry and can where useful conscript Irish or American poets to purpose while remaining securely within the English mainstream. The Irish poet, in contrast, has two heritages, Irish and Anglo-Irish, that had developed largely though not wholly separately. The Irish poetic tradition, Kinsella believed, had long afforded the same air of continuity as its English counterpart, but then collapsed in the 19th century. The upshot was that the contemporary Irish poet now inherited a foreshortened English literary heritage developed in provincial colonial circumstances and stood across a rift in time from an older Irish tradition that collapsed in the 19th century. Irish poets, Kinsella concluded, were legatees to a broken and gapped tradition and a “divided mind”. Major talents such as James Joyce and Yeats, he surmised, could survive this situation unimpaired; lesser writers less so.

Half a century later, much in Kinsella’s thoughtful essay seems dated. A writer surveying the scene now would have to consider not only the present relationship of Irish and Hiberno-English literary traditions but also the new ethnic minorities and how Irish, British and Northern Irish (or Ulster?) literary heritages might be orchestrated were some “New Ireland” attainable. If the problem for Americans is that their sense of national literature was unsettled in the 1960s or 1970s but the more inclusive new canons taught in schools and universities find little acceptance in the fiercely divided political nation, the issues for the European Union, at a supranational level, and for an Ireland that is being absorbed into the European Union even as it also weighs the possibility of a “New Ireland” are substantially different. To transpose the American situation on to the European or Irish ones does none of these situations justice.

[ Yeats Now: How WB’s poetry still echoes in our lives ]

Perhaps the real reason that national literatures and literary canons seem troubling in the United States and Europe is not so much that they belong to a bygone age as that the task of renovating and adapting them to a new political and technological world system is formidable. The obvious danger in such circumstance is one best expressed by William Burroughs of a different product: “The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer; he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his product; he degrades and simplifies the client.” In other words, where imagined communities, national or supranational, cannot find higher means to express, connect and consolidate themselves, they will probably find more debased means to do so.

This returns us to the earlier question of who cultivates a national literature. Government bodies and arts councils devise policies and dispense bursaries but cannot engineer national literatures of quality. Historically, it is writers and critics or writer-critics with a strong sense of history that have most thoughtfully attempted to refashion national literatures. In the last century, people such as TS Eliot and FR Leavis, Virginia Woolf and Helen Gardner, Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton made distinguished contributions to rethinking English national literature and culture. In Ireland, Yeats and Daniel Corkery, Seán Ó Faoláin and John Hewitt, Thomas Kinsella and Seamus Deane, Eavan Boland and Edna Longley, Seán Ó Tuama and Breandán Ó Buachalla, Declan Kiberd and Terence Brown did something similar. The writers listed here pursued accomplished literary careers but found time nonetheless in essays and addresses to reflect critically on national cultures and literary traditions. Like or dislike their takes, the critics had a synoptic range, comprehensive sensibility and senses of civic and literary responsibility that they generally tried to balance. Collectively, their literary and critical works generated something like Yeats’s “remorseless criticism of the literature of their country” that nurtured higher ambition.

For the national literatures of tomorrow it will be as necessary to look forward as back. Literary remediations in new technologies will matter as much as retaining and reworking what worked well in the past. It will be as important to be as strenuous as generous on questions of value. How to create an ambitious Irish national literature for the future poses pressing questions on many fronts, islandwide and European. Yeats’s Nobel centenary is a good time to get new conversations going.

Joe Cleary is professor of English at Yale University. His most recent books are Modernism, Empire, World Literature (2021) and The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization (2021). You can read William Butler Yeats’s speech at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm on December 10th, 1923, here