Imagining
Anthony Bradley
The early poems and plays of W. B. Yeats played an important role in creating the cultural identity of the modern Irish nation. The nature of his achievement is not always fully understood or credited. Yeats translated the Irish landscape into poetry in English; he wrote ballads that were inspired in content and form by the residual Gaelic culture; he wrote plays that invoked Gaelic legend but were politically effective in the contemporary moment. Long before it became the conventional view, he understood that the nation was a mythic entity, an “imagined community” united by poetry, song, and drama, and that his own work was a significant contribution to building such a nation. He understood, too, that art such as his provided much of the emotional energy and motivation for nationalist ideology. Yeats’s powerful achievement has to be qualified by registering the essentialism of his concept of the nation, an essentialism apparent in the historical context, in which “the people” imagined as a unity are in fact dis-united by allegiances of class, religion, gender, politics, and ethnicity. The argument can thus be made that the nation is characterized more by hybridity and liminality than by a unifying homogeneity. Yeats is aware of this dissonance, but to a great extent remains uncompromising in his concept of the nation.