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A literary fascism
Yeats’ poetry transcended
all his devices.
By Frank Armstrong
56June 2015
June 2015 57
L
ITERARY deities loom over Ire-
land like US Presidents carved
into Mount Rushmore. It isn’t
philosophers, engineers, chefs,
painters or even composers who
summoned the Irish nation, but poets.
Yet conversely their hovering presence
barely registers; just as most contempo-
rary Florentines scurry about unmoved
by Brunelleschi’s dome, few here look to
the sky in awe.
Poets build bridges of a more indeter-
minate kind than engineers. As W.H.
Auden writes in a poem occasioned by
the death of William Butler Yeats: “Mad
Ireland hurt you into poetry. / Now Ire-
land has her madness and her weather
still, / For poetry makes nothing
happen”.
Auden goes too far with that dis-
missal of poetry – whatever about his
contemptuous view of Ireland – correct-
ing himself by acknowledging a few
lines later: “it survives / a way of hap-
pening, a mouth”. This ‘way of
happening’ is in the realm of quantum
uncertainty where the extraordinary
occurs: coincidences beyond logic, or
the ill-defined emotion generated by a
sight of great aesthetic beauty. Poetry
does not fit with classical renderings of
reality, the routines of life and the seem-
ingly static laws of nature are defied. It
is unsurprising that poets, Yeats fore-
most, should dabble in the occult and
mysticism, scouring every system of
thought, even the eccentric, for expla-
nations for the mysteries they
encounter.
June th is the th anniver-
sary of W.B. Yeats. Born in Sandymount
he spent much of his adult life in
London, but moved permanently to Ire-
land after the War of Independence,
purchasing a former tower house, Thoor
Ballylee, in County Galway where he
“paced upon the battlements and
stared” at the birth pangs of the Irish
state.
Yeats will always be identified with
County Sligo, the home of many of his
ancestors. Innisfree on Lough Gill, Lis-
sadell, ‘far off Rosses’, Knocknarea and
Ben Bulben under which he is buried
form the mythical backdrop to his
Romantic musing. The riveting land-
scape triggered imaginative
contemplation perhaps unsurpassed in
the English language: “Come away oh
Human Child / To the waters and the
wild / With a fairy hand in hand / For the
world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand”. The enchanting sur-
roundings engendered Yeats’ poetry but
simultaneously he made that landscape
poetic. When we view immanent Ben
Bulben now we are to some extent hon-
ouring the songlines that brought its
majesty a reality apart. But for all his
evocations of that county, in his
descriptions the people are more ethe-
real than real, moulded in the
fairy-realm of his imagination. A far cry
from the gritty characters in Joyce’s
‘Dubliners’.
Like rebellious children questioning
the authority of their father, most of the
Irish literary pantheon have had a diffi-
cult relationship with their homeland,
often preferring exile and ruminating
on it from afar. Beckett went so far to
write in French to escape the excesses of
English, to write “without style”. But
Yeats stayed and grew embittered that
the nation did not accord him the acco-
lades he felt his due. Perhaps he aspired
to a presidential role similar to that
later bestowed on Vaclav Havel when the
Czechs gained their independence after
the fall of the Iron Curtain. But he prob-
ably would have found delinquencies to
fulminate against. Politics is the art of
the possible, its grubby affairs a torment
to the idealist.
Long before independence Yeats was
bemoaning a Romantic Ireland dead and
gone and castigating those that fumbled
in their greasy till. But the lofty aspira-
tion he had for his country was always
doomed to failure, like his enduring
affection for Maud Gonne which he
finally consummated unsatisfactorily in
later life before soon proposing to her
daughter. Independent Ireland could
never reach his expectations, a roman-
tic relationship has ultimate failure
encoded in its DNA.
Crucially Yeats came from the Protes-
tant Ascendancy, “the men of Burke and
of Grattan”, and to many among the
ascendant Catholic nation who inher-
ited the independent state he had only a
shallow claim to being Irish. This sepa-
ration worked both ways as the poet
who initially embraced and breathed
life into Irish nationalism through the
cultural revival and plays such as Cath-
leen ni Houlihan, later identified
himself with an aristocracy that he saw
as providing a natural leadership for a
Creole nation.
Here he fought a losing battle against
the enduring tradition of republicanism
that rejected aristocracy and prized
equality and democracy. He also con-
tended with the powerful force of
sectarianism that would not contem-
plate Yeats and his caste at the helm. For
many hard-bitten Catholics who
retained a collective memory of the pri-
vations of the Penal Laws and the
Famine, independence was an opportu-
nity to build a Catholic state for a
Catholic people.
The inter-war period (-)
beheld terrible years of fear, poverty
and continued conflict in Europe that
foreshadowed the cataclysm of World
War II. In the immediate aftermath of
World War I Yeats wrote prophetically:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world, / The blood-dimmed tide is
loosed”. In response to what he per-
ceived as the failings of democracy he
chose a reactionary Right as opposed to
an egalitarian Left which, as he saw it,
would brutally sweep aside an aristo-
cratic elect and usher in a doomed era of
materialism. This made Yeats sympa-
thetic to fascism and perhaps even
Nazism.
In his exploration of the ill-defined
ideology of fascism the historian Roger
Eatwell writes: “Fascism has become a
latter-day symbol of evil, like the Devil
in the Middle Ages. Demonising all
aspects of fascism, a founding form of
Political Correctness, has its uses. But
failure to take fascism seriously as a
body of ideas makes it more difficult to
understand how fascism could attract a
remarkably diverse following in some
countries”. We might therefore talk of
fascisms, and see them in historical
context: a reaction to the chaos
unleashed by the Great War and the
responsibility of rampant capitalism for
the Great Depression as well as the
shocking excesses of triumphant Marx-
ism in Russia. To many inter-war
intellectuals democracy was failing and
the collectivist ideology of Communism
did not respect the individual. Also, it
should not necessarily be conflated with
anti-Semitism, especially the genocidal
character it assumed, which had a far
longer history and was not initially a
feature of Mussolini’s approach.
A recent biography of Yeats, ‘Blood
Kindred: W.B. Yeats, The Life, The
Death, The Politics’ by W.J. McCormack
outlines aspects of Yeats’ fascist sympa-
thies. He provides details of Yeats’ letter
of thanks to Freidrich Krebs, Oberburg-
meister of Frankfurt, acknowledging
June 13th 2015
is the 150th
anniversary
of W.B. Yeats’
birth
“
CULTURE Yeats
58June 2015
CULTURE Yeats
receipt of an award in , his public
approval of Nazi legislation depriving
Jews of their property in , and
aspects of his anti-Semitism. McCor-
mack concludes that Yeats was a fellow
traveller:”on occasion. He did not travel
early, and he did not travel often” but he
“gave comfort to democracy’s enemies,
to decency’s enemies”.
Writing in George Orwell, the
steady social democrat, considered:
“Translated into political terms, Yeats’
tendency is Fascist. Throughout most of
his life, and long before Fascism was
ever heard of, he had had the outlook of
those who reach Fascism by the aristo-
cratic route. He is a great hater of
democracy, of the modern world, sci-
ence, machinery, the concept of
progress – above all, of the idea of
human equality. Much of the imagery of
his work is feudal, and it is clear that he
was not altogether free from ordinary
snobbishness. Later these tendencies
took clearer shape and led him to “the
exultant acceptance of authoritarianism
as the only solution. Even violence and
tyranny are not necessarily evil because
the people, knowing not evil and good,
would become perfectly acquiescent to
tyranny. . . . Everything must come from
the top. Nothing can come from the
masses”.
Furthermore, Yeats “fails to see that
the new authoritarian civilization will
not be aristocratic. It will be ruled by
anonymous millionaires, shiny bot-
tomed bureaucrats and murdering
gangsters”.
Orwell is generally unimpressed by
Yeats’ poetry, and we hear similiar anti-
Irish prejudices to those found in
Auden’s work. He writes that “one
seldom comes on six consecutive lines of
his verse in which there is not an archa-
ism or an affected turn of speech”. To an
extent this criticism can be imputed to
that writer’s affection for sparse, atten-
uated language which he spells out in
his essay ‘The Politics of the English
Language’. His attitude is encapsulated
in his evaluation of one poem that: “It
would probably have been deadlier if it
had been neater”.
Nonetheless even Orwell swoons at
some poems: “Yeats gets away with it,
and if his straining after effect is often
irritating, it can also produce phrases
(“the chill, footless years”, “the macker-
el-crowded seas”) which suddenly
overwhelm one like a girl’s face seen
across a room”.
Not surprisingly, Orwell lambasts
Yeats’ occult dabbling: “As soon as we
begin to read about the so-called system
we are in the middle of a hocus-pocus of
great wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon,
reincarnation, disembodied spirits,
astrology and what not”. These he links
to reactionary leanings: if everything is
indeed cyclical then the kind of society
based on equality and democracy that
Orwell prized was in some sense Sisy-
phean, a doomed effort”.
For any devotee of Yeats it is difficult
to confront the fairly compelling body
of evidence for this tendency, but as has
been stressed these sympathies came at
a time when the horror of Nazism was
not apparent; when Communism might
have seemed more contemptuous of
human life and when the few remaining
democracies were in the midst of the
Great Depression. Yeats was wedded to
archaic notions of aristocracy and fas-
cism appeared to fit with his
prescriptions. He failed to recognise the
genocidal evil that lurked there.
Moreover, he was never implicated
politically in any fascist movement. In
fact the political campaigns that Yeats
became involved in during his lifetime:
the Irish Cultural Revival in the early
s and the campaign to retain
divorce in the s were progressive
in character.
We find a flawed character in W.B.
Yeats, like Orwell himself who informed
on his former political brethren, but one
who produced poetry perhaps unbet-
tered in the English language in the
twentieth century. None of it diminishes
his greatness. We may bask in his words
without subscribing to his political
views.
Once a poem is written, the chord
attaching it to the author is broken, and
it assumes a life of its own. •
Yeats gave
comfort to
democracy’s
enemies, to
decency’s
enemies
“
the dangers
