One night in November 1923, the future Editor of The Irish Times, Bertie Smyllie, telephoned W.B. Yeats to tell him that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Journalists evidently kept long hours even then, for Yeats later recalled that news of his success reached him between 10 and 11 at night! Aesthetic values and lofty idealism were set aside as the poet insisted on knowing how much this honour was worth. The answer was £7,500, a tidy sum in the early 1920s.
Yeats and his wife George celebrated with a plate of sausages, having failed to find a bottle of wine in their cellar! The following evening, during a presumably more elaborate dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel, a congratulatory telegram arrived from James Joyce, who, for the remaining 18 years of his life, never managed to find favour with the Nobel Committee.
A few weeks later, Mr and Mrs Yeats set off by ferry for Sweden where the coveted prize was conferred on this "60-year-old smiling public man" by King Gustav V at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10th. It came at a time of great achievement in Irish literature. Joyce's Ulysses had been published just two years before while Sean O'Casey's first great play, The Shadow of a Gunman, premiered at the Abbey Theatre in April 1923.
Yeats himself, who had lately returned to Ireland and been appointed to the Senate, was in full creative flow. He had recently written Leda and the Swan and one of his greatest longer poems, Meditations in Time of Civil War, containing that quintessentially evocative Yeatsian line, "caught in the cold snows of a dream". This was also a time of huge turmoil in Irish life with the ending of the Civil War and the emergence of the Irish Free State.
Yeats's Nobel Prize was the first of four won by Irish-born authors during the 20th century. His award was the one most clearly linked with Ireland. Yeats believed it to be a product of international interest in Ireland's resurgent nationality.
The chairman of the Nobel Committee remarked that Yeats's "decisive development was linked to Ireland" and described the poet as "the interpreter of his country". In 1925, Shaw's prize was accepted on his behalf by the British Ambassador to Sweden, while Beckett's was handed over to his French agent in 1969. In neither case was the writer's Irish background emphasised in Stockholm.
In his address to the Swedish Academy, Yeats chose to speak about the Irish dramatic movement. It began with a memorable example of his flair for giving shape to Irish history. He proclaimed that "the modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in 1891. A disillusioned and embittered Ireland turned away from parliamentary politics; an event was conceived and the race began, as I think, to be troubled by that event's long gestation." Although less memorable than some of his history-making lines of poetry - "a terrible beauty is born" or "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave"- his contention that the Irish revolution had deep cultural roots has enjoyed a lengthy shelf life. Yeats's thesis runs through Conor Cruise O'Brien's influential 1972 book, States of Ireland, and is contested by Roy Foster in his authoritative history, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, published in 1988. No account of the genesis of Irish independence can afford to ignore Yeats's fetching analysis. In his 1995 Nobel Prize speech, Seamus Heaney paid tribute to Yeats, who, he said, had come to Stockholm in 1923 to tell the world that "the local work of poets and dramatists had been as important to the transformation of his native place and times as the ambushes of guerrilla armies". Heaney echoed Yeats as he reflected on how his own contemporaries had "helped to imagine" late 20th century Ireland.
What then was the impact of Yeats's "stir of thought"? It is entirely possible that Irish independence would eventually have been won without the influence of the Gaelic League, the GAA, or indeed the emotional nationalism of Yeats's Kathleen ni Houlihan. It may well be that the presence of three published poets among the 1916 leaders was entirely coincidental and that revolutionary pragmatism and opportunism were more influential than Gaelic idealism as a harbinger of independence.
Whatever weight we choose to give to the political impact of cultural nationalism, modern Ireland would surely have been a different place without what Oliver MacDonagh has called "the Irishing of Ireland" that occurred during Yeats's heyday.
Had Ireland been granted Home Rule under Parnell in the 1890s, where would the incentive for attempting to de-Anglicise Ireland have come from? The leaders of a Home Rule Ireland would hardly have invested much effort in seeking to revive the Irish language. With its political dimension removed, would the GAA have evolved into such a defining element of modern Irish identity?
Traditional music and dance also benefited from Yeats's "stir of thought". These help delineate the distinctiveness of today's Ireland's. The existence of a conspicuous tradition of Irish literature in English is yet another precocious legacy of the Yeats generation.
While historians brood about the burden of culture on Irish history, not enough credit is given to the positive impact of our past on today's Ireland. We are, for dearth of comparative perspective, inclined to undervalue Ireland's possession of perhaps the strongest native culture of any advanced European nation.
Where else will you find traditional music played so routinely? Is there any European country with a native sport that can match the success of hurling and Gaelic football in more than holding their own against the universal lure of soccer?
While Irish has not been revived, it remains a meaningful component of Irish identity as reflected in the existence of TG4, Radio na Gaeltachta and a network of Gaelscoileanna dotted around the country.
These enduring remnants of traditional culture, whose survival has in many ways been against the odds in the teeth of modernisation, are all, in one way or another, legacies of Yeats's "long gestation". It is, therefore, as a breeder of contemporary Irish identity, rather than as a spur to political ferment, that the cultural movements Yeats lionised in his Nobel speech deserve recognition.
W.B. Yeats was not the only person honoured by the Swedish Academy 80 years ago. Alongside Yeats, an Austrian scientist won an award for his work on the microanalysis of organic substances while two Canadian researchers were honoured for the discovery of insulin, thereby leaving a legacy of more worldly value than Yeats's.
Nonetheless, their names, Banting and MacLeod, have dropped out of our collective memory, while, in testimony to the power of literature, Yeats's reputation looks set to retain its lustre in sturdy defiance of passing time.
Looking back on the Nobel exploits of Irish-born writers, I wonder if the gestation of some great event will be needed to fire Irish creativity during the 21st century?