The opening lectures at the Yeats Summer School revisited the poet's complex relationship with Irish nationalism yesterday. The contribution of ethnic and geographic ideas to his thinking was explored.
Prof George Watson said the poet was more influenced by Matthew Arnold's ethnological theories, especially about the Celts, than he ever admitted. The link between the longing for a home place and nationalism was explored by Dr Jonathan Allison.
Arnold's praise of reputed Celtic qualities of passion and melancholy was combined with the conclusion that these derived from the Celts' refusal to "accept the tyranny of fact" and they were therefore unsuitable for self-government, said Dr Watson, of the University of Aberdeen.
Yeats could not accept this, but did lean on Arnold's idea that the Celts were capable of devotion to one great cause and were tragic and heroic in defeat. "Arnold's emphasis on the tragic Celt was useful to Yeats, because he was battling against the stereotype of the tragic Paddy," said Prof Watson.
Arnold absorbed the whole Victorian obsession with ethnology, but his identification of a Celtic racial type was useful to Yeats. "When he was setting out to create Irish literature, he relied on racial type, on the Celtic gene pool, as well as his own talent. He did not have to rely on literary tradition."
Yeats also took on Arnold's contempt for what he called philistines, and he identified Irish philistinism with Trinity College. His denunciations of philistinism in Ireland presaged his later rows over a gallery for the Hugh Lane pictures, said Prof Watson.
Dr Allison, of the University of Kentucky, said Yeats saw places like Inishfree, Coole Park, Ballylee as central landmarks, linking the idea of home and the idea of nation. "These sites are meeting places, regenerative sources for the nation at large.
"He took delight in isolated places of meditation, safe, bounded places, free from modernity, places for the free play of the imagination."
Yeats recognised the link between the imagination and communitarianism, he said. He wrote of the people of east Galway as "bound together by imaginative possessions".
He urged painters to paint "the exact grey of the bare Burren hills, so that they may discover a new style - their very selves". The essential self was seen as a national self.
His evocation of places like Glencar and Inishfree represented a triple homecoming, back to the nation, back to the family (his mother's family, the Pollexfens from Sligo) and back to the self, Dr Allison said.
However, as he became disillusioned with popular nationalism, he turned more to protected environments, walled spaces. "There is less of a celebration of landscape and a greater stress on houses and their history and associations."
But these were not completely enclosed. Lady Gregory's house at Coole was valued precisely because it allowed penetration by a folk culture from outside, it was more a meeting place between its Anglo-Irish inhabitants and the surrounding population.
Nationalism in the work of Yeats is just one of the themes being explored over the next two weeks. Prof Helen Vendler of Harvard University is one of those who will be analysing the poems in detail and exploring their forms. She will be concentrating on the volume, The Wild Swans at Coole, published after the 1916 Rising.