irish

THE IRISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE
This movement, which was responsible for a period of immense literary productivity, lasted from roughly 1890 into the 1920's. It was spearheaded by William Butler Yeats, perhaps the greatest poet writing in English. Yeats, seventeen years Joyce's senior, formed the notion of a national literature that would take its inspiration from Irish myth and folktale. Under the influence of his friend George Russell (who wrote under the mystic name "AE") he imbued his work with a strong element of spiritualism, while under the influence of the Fenian John O'Leary and of Maud Gonne, the woman he loved, he also linked it to nationalist aspirations. The political and aesthetic dimensions to his work did not always coexist easily, however. In 1899 Yeats helped found the Irish Literary Theatre, and presented there his play Countess Cathleen. Although his later play Kathleen Ni Houlihan was enormously successful with Nationalists, Countess Cathleen, relying on an aristocratic figure who sells her soul to the devil in exchange for food for her starving people, caused riots protesting "a libel on Irish womanhood." In Portrait Stephen is portrayed as one of the few students at University College who refuse to sign a petition against the play, and in so doing he appears to choose art over politics. Later, he recites a verse from the play. These details are in fact autobiographical. Joyce knew many of Yeats's poems by heart, and may have been drawn to specialize in prose because he feared he could not compete as a poet.

By the time he left University College Joyce had met a number of figures in the Revival, including Yeats, George Russell, and Yeats's patron and collaborator Lady Augusta Gregory. On the strength of a few essays and verses he had begun to make a name for himself. But despite his enthusiasm for Yeats's work, Joyce from the beginning had serious reservations about the direction of Yeats's movement. For one thing, all the major figures were of the Protestant landholding class, and Yeats especially had an almost feudal respect for the "great families" like Lady Gregory's who were his models of aristocracy. The remainder of Yeats's sympathy lay with the unlettered peasantry, whom he saw as a repository of folk wisdom and mystic insight. Joyce, a member of the urban poor with a very different notion of aristocracy, had little patience with this aspect of the Revival. And while he disliked British imperialism as strongly as Yeats's generation of writers, he was reluctant to join a movement such as the Gaelic League, which he saw as bigoted, backward-looking, and Church-dominated. With his friend George Clancy he briefly took Irish lessons from Padraic Pearse, a poet who was later executed after the 1916 Insurrection, but objected to Pearse's disparagement of the English language. Also, like Stephen he feared to commit himself wholly to a political movement in search of martyrs.