Tuesday the 13th
Modern Irish literature is informed and motivated by two equal yet opposite themes: the need to generate income from literary endeavors and the need to outline, or as Joyce said ‘forge’, a distinct position on Irish society the better to distinguish their work from their literary rivals.
Irish literature is rewarding to those beyond their ability solely because their work reflects the necessary zeitgeist. It gives credence to books that promote and nurture popular media opinions of both urban and rural life.
The legacy of W.B. Yeats
cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry
Our nation's literary development has been inexticably bound with the career of W.B. Yeats. From the development of a national theatre, his involvement with Irish politics, and his instigation of procedure to catalogue, translate and distribute all surviving texts in Irish. His influence, above all other writers, remains the most lasting in Irish Literature; allowing the nation to forge a separate modern identity beyond that inherited from abroad
He was an Irish writer above all in his constant reworking of his past work so that it seemed to constantly anticipate his present work with remarkable ease.
Behind all of the lyrical finery, Yeats was fifty before he could have hoped to live off his poetry yet through out his life signed cheques as 'Yours Sincerely, W.B. Yeats'.
he was one of the few whose history is the history of their own itme, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them - T.S. Eliot
"We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence."
W. B. Yeats, speech in the Irish Senate, June 11, 1925