Sir, – When WB Yeats delivered his Nobel lecture in Stockholm in December 1923, he spoke about his role in “that stir of thought”, the cultural movements that paved the way of Ireland’s independence.
He was thinking about his leadership of the literary revival of the 1890s, the part he played in founding the Abbey Theatre and the many poems and plays he wrote that had developments in Ireland as their theme.
After receiving his prize, senator Yeats continued to act as a “public man” during the Irish Free State’s fraught early years, spending most of the last 20 years of his life in Ireland. Thus, from the 1880s to the 1930s, Yeats was continually active in Irish public life. It is difficult to think of any modern writer in the English language who could match his sustained commitment to the country of his birth.
While James Joyce is rightly lauded in Dublin, including at the excellent MoLI on St Stephen’s Green, for his intense but time-limited engagement with Ireland, Yeats receives far less attention despite his lifelong commitment to the “indomitable” Irishness he wrote about in Under Ben Bulben. The Yeats Society (Sligo) struggles to keep itself afloat with limited resources and could do with being put on a firmer financial footing.
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At the close of what has been a highly successful Decade of Centenaries, this seems to me a good time to consider how Yeats’s rich literary legacy should be marked during this, the second century of Irish independence.
I have suggested that the National Library might consider establishing a Yeats branch in Sligo to provide a fitting living memorial to our greatest poet in the county from which he drew such immense inspiration.
As our revolutionary era moves further into the past, Yeats’s poetry is likely to become more important as a witness to that eventful era when Ireland was “changed, changed utterly”. – Yours, etc,
DANIEL MULHALL,
Honorary president,
Yeats Society,
Sligo.