One of us or one of them

YEATS was very much a "common man" and a man of the people, who sought all his life to create a literature which was popular, Professor Ronald Schuchard of Emory University in Atlanta laid at the opening lecture of the Yeats Summer School yesterday.

Professor Schuchard, who is the director of the school in Sligo, was defending the poet against the charges of elitism. "One rarely hears an academic discussion today that does not portray Yeats variously as an elitist, a protoascist, an anti democratic reactionary, an Anglo Irish snob, an aloof "other" whose aristocratic ideals "had little room for the common man of Catholic Ireland," he said.

This was not just the case in academia. "Each year I am astonished to hear in the barber chairs and newsagents and woollen shops of Sligo that Yeats is `not one of us', that he is `one of them'."

Yet it was in Co Sligo that Yeats defined his audience, his aims as an artist in the nationalist movement, his notions of personality, manhood and national character, he said.

Professor Schuchard detailed the personalities from Co Sligo, and later from Coole, whom Yeats befriended and from whom he learned of the imagination and outlook of the Irish peasantry. "Already their heroic character was informing his heroic ideal for Ireland," he said.

Yeats hoped to bring this to the townspeople, who had not only become cut off from the old stories but whose sense of literature had become degraded by a flood of vulgar, halfpenny periodicals. To this end he sought to create a national literature by attempting to recreate an oral tradition of poetry and through the Abbey Theatre.

Yet he was opposed by the "Irish Irelanders" who accused him of not being "one of us" and his literature of being "AngloIrish", Professor Schuchard said.

"The mouthpiece of this middle class Catholic party, which founded on journalism rather than literature, was D.P. Moran, editor from 1900 of The Leader. Yeats was portrayed by Moran as a key figure in the mongrelising of Irish literature," he said.

"Moran and the Irish Irelanders were but one manifestation of a political split that Yeats brooded over and continued to explain for the rest of his life."

He pointed to Yeats's own condemnation of the role of journalism in three crucial moments in Irish history: the Parnell controversy, the dispute over The Playboy of the Western World and the refusal of Dublin Corporation to house Hugh Lane's art collection.

Of these, the one that had the most enduring effect was the opposition to the Playboy. Professor Schuchard pointed out how, in both poetry and prose, Yeats returned again and again to that incident and to its significance for the future of the nation as a whole.

He quoted from the poet's essay "Poetry and Tradition" (1907) where he wrote: "Power passed to small shopkeepers, to clerks, to that very class who had seemed to John O'Leary so ready to bend to the power of others, to men who had risen above the traditions of the countryman, without learning those of cultivated life or even educating themselves, and who, because of their poverty, their ignorance, their superstitious piety, are much subject to all kinds of fear."

"No," commented Professor Schuchard, "Yeats did not develop a contempt for the people, but we have only begun to measure how deeply Yeats was affected by the Playboy riots and how they struck at the heart of his being."

DR Anne Fogarty of UCD, and the school's associate director, said that Yeats's early, pastoral poetry was not just a retreat from the real world, as Yeats himself had described it, but embodied many of the themes and images of his later work.

The pastoral tradition was itself contradictory. "Pastoral life is rarely synonymous with Arcadia and seems more often to be an ambivalent mixture of Eden before and after the Fall."

Yeats's poem, The Stolen Child, presents a vision of an Edenic other world "which is poised between the delights of pastoral and the deflationary but equally alluring images of the real world". By the end of the poem it is the everyday world which carries the assurance of communality and happiness, and the faery world which seems to portend sadness and separation, she said.

The radical potential of Yeats's complex modern vision of pastoral simplicity depends, not on escapist fantasy, but on "the urge to turn the ambiguity of human desire into a transformative force," she concluded.