Nobel endeavour – An Irishman’s Diary about how WB Yeats won literature’s greatest prize

In the year that he finally became Ireland’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, WB Yeats was not this country’s only nominee. It makes for a sobering reflection of the nature of literary fame to note that he was joined on the list by Darrell Figgis – who is remembered now, if at all, for his political activities, but whose writings are almost entirely forgotten.

Figgis played a central role in the Howth gun-running, but by 1922 he and his trademark red beard had become objects of scorn even from many of his former allies. In June of that year, a group of anti-Treaty republicans forcibly shaved him as a joke.

Alas, there wasn’t much funny about the rest of his life. He didn’t win the Nobel, and depressed by other events including his wife’s suicide (with a gun Michael Collins had given them after the 1922 assault), he too died by his own hand, in 1925.

Nominated

None of which was Yeats’s fault. As Anthony Jordan will explain in a talk in Sandymount next week, the poet had more than paid his dues by 1922, when he was nominated for the fifth time in 20 years. It was surely his turn to win.

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Yeats had first been proposed for the prize in 1902, by the Trinity College professor and unionist MP William Lecky. Then, 12 years later, he was nominated from the other end of the political spectrum, via George Plunkett, father of Joseph Mary, who was entitled to put names forward as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Neither of those proposals succeeded, but in 1915 Yeats seemed to be closing in on the prize, thanks to a nomination from a member of the Swedish Academy itself, the body that chooses the laureates.

And in 1921, he was again put forward by another academy member, Erik Axel Karlfeldt, also a poet, and who twice disbarred himself from nomination, before being awarded the prize posthumously (at a time when that was still possible) in 1931.

By 1922, along with Swedish support, Yeats had the winds of political change in Ireland at his back. But Figgis apart, he might also have had a rival compatriot in the formidable form of James Joyce, who had just unleashed Ulysses upon the world.

Desmond FitzGerald, father of Garret and a member of the first Free State government, told Joyce he would seek a nomination. In the event, however, that was too much for FitzGerald's conservative colleagues to swallow. The author of Ulysses went un-nominated in his lifetime.

And so, in 1923, the triumph of Yeats, at his fifth attempt, was confirmed. Like Wandering Aengus, he had landed the prize, and Aengus’s song helped clinch it. Introducing Yeats at the ceremony in Stockholm, the academy president said: “We have been especially charmed by your poem about the little ‘silver trout’.”

Anthony Jordan will further elucidate the subject when he speaks next Monday – his subject’s 151st birthday – in Sandymount Green, where a bust proclaims WB as a local boy, born around the corner on Sandymount Avenue.

But of course Yeats is not the only Nobel winner of whom Sandymount can boast.

On the contrary, by the time Jordan speaks there on Monday, one laureated head will be gazing across the park at another, that of Seamus Heaney, who lived in this area for many years. For later today, a bronze bust of the 1995 Nobel winner, by Armagh sculptor Carolyn Mulholland, will also go on display in the Green, opposite Yeats.

The particular occasion is the 50th anniversary of Death of a Naturalist, the 1966 collection that launched Heaney to fame.

The general motive, according to Sheila Pratschke – chairwoman of the Arts Council, which is loaning the bust – is to honour publicly a sense of civic duty of a man “who did so much to build a ‘Republic of Conscience’”.

A fellow poet-citizen of that Republic, Paul Durcan, will be among those paying tribute to Heaney and will recall the last time he met him, then 72, a few years ago. It happened elsewhere in the neighbourhood, on that other celebrated piece of literary real estate, Sandymount Strand.

Durcan subsequently wrote his friend a “letter-poem” about it, “Sandymount Strand Keep Going”, which recalls the Derry man emerging from the glare of the sun that day: “So that all I could decipher was a silhouette with hat,/Yet with the unmistakeable posture of his farmer father.”

The bust will be unveiled by Dublin Lord Mayor Críona Ní Dhálaigh at 4pm this afternoon.