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A Book of Irish Verse (Routledge Classics)
by W.B. Yeats (Introduction: John Banville)
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Routledge (2002-07-11)
ISBN: 0415289831
EAN: 9780415289832
Dewy Decimal #: 821.00809417
Paperback: 208 pages
Edition: 2
SKU: B433-1334
Condition: As New
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Customer Reviews
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"On I went in sad dejection..."
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-06-06
"To remember that in Ireland the professional or landed classes have been through the mould of English universities, and are ignorant of the very names of the best writers in this book, is to know how strong a wind blows from the ancient legends of Ireland, how vigorous an impulse to create is in her today."
Yeats worked insistently throughout his life to create a modern national literature for Ireland, free from both the dead hand of political ideology and the wild abandonment of ballads suitable only for `a world when all was old enough to be steeped in emotion.' In this collection he presents us with poems and poets worked from just those influences, which whilst definitive for their own context had become for Yeats symbolic of `mechanism' or `weakness' in a modern writer. In his introduction he is not sparing; the earliest poets, Moore and Callanan, are `artificial' and `naive'; those of the Young Ireland set are `not of literary importance', even `insincere as they lived in half-illusions'; Mangan had done `little permanently interesting', and Ferguson is `frequently dull'.
Despite the pounding, I found the work as a whole quite effective. The focus of the earlier eighteenth century poets on defeat and lamentation sets the tone. Most of the poems are either funeral dirges to lost kings, chiefs, lovers, etc, or eulogies to past great ones whose shadows cast into relief the political realities of the time.
There's a good variety of style though despite this apparent one-dimensionality. The Burial of Sir John Moore reads with granite realism; Mangan's catalogues and Ferguson's tragic-epic Welshmen of Tirawley give a sort of classic edge. There's plenty of great Gaels throughout (some whom have an unfortunate penchant for eye-gouging) and about as many references to fairies as a man could seriously be asked to take from one volume (according to William Allingham, in his poem The Fairies, their favourite food is crispy-pancakes - which is good to know because really I'd just assumed it was Lucky Charms).
By the end of the book, with poets straying into Catholic religiosity, I began to feel how something like Ego Dominus Tuus was needed in the Ireland after the turn of the century:
"The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality."
From this volume we can see Yeats as a poet strong enough to make and remake himself by his own powers, rather than relying completely upon the contingency of reaction, or the crutch of `some fine ancient song' awaiting translation. Read it for its own merits by all means, there are some gems here, but through some Yeats I think it's more appreciable.
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