Irish Modernism: Poetry and Drama
Shortly before Wilde's death, the myth of the fallen hero had entered the vocabulary of Irish literature with the demise of Charles Stuart Parnell, Protestant hero of the Irish Nationalist community. Savaged from the pulpit and the editorial page for his adulterous involvement with Kitty O'Shea, Parnell had resigned in disgrace, defended by only a few lonely voices in the literary world. He died shortly afterwards, and Irish constitutional politics dies with him. The changed atmosphere of Irish life is caught in the work of J.M. Synge (1871-1909) and George Moore (1852-1933), who wrestled to accommodate a tradition they now saw rapidly slipping into the hands of the priests. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907), with its parricidal hero, is the last and perhaps the most brilliant attempt at a fundamentally English view of Irish peasant life, and was greated by riots when it opened at The Abbey. His friend George Moore identified Catholicism as a life-denying and authoritarian creed, and his extraordinary volume The Untilled Field (1903) in many ways anticipates much later writers. Meanwhile the separatist Sinn Fein party made great advances, and in 1916, led by the poet Padraig Pearse (1879-1916) and James Connolly (1868-1916), an important socialist figure and powerful writer, there was an armed insurrection in Dublin. It was crushed savagely. Connolly and all the other leaders were court-martialled and shot, thereby becoming heroes overnight, and leading Yeats to observe that everything had been "changed utterly" and that "a terrible beauty" had been born. William Butler-Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the most written-about but most elusive characters in Irish literature. A Protestant aristocrat who argued for Irish independence, he helped found the world's first national theatre, The Abbey, before the nation even existed. He wrote early Iyrical ballads about gossamer fairies and stunning sunsets until, stricken with desire for the beautiful Maude Gonne, he began reaming out some of the century's greatest works of unrequited love. Much of the work of his middle period lambasts the Dublin middle class for its money-grabbing complacency - September 1913 is well worth a read if white-lipped rage is your thing. In 1923 Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Litearture, though he had become somewhat disillusioned with the world, expressed in his bleak poem The Second Coming , part of the collection Michael Robertes and the Dancer (1921). Yeats' later period is more problematic, however, producing a series of spare, lucid but complex meditations on the artist's task. The influence of Yeats, in many ways the father of modern Irish litearature and one of the most important English languuage poets of all time, cannot be underestimated. Until the 1920s Yeats kept up a friendship with Sean O'Casey (1884-1964), who was that rarest of things, a working-class Irish writer. The Dublin slums in which he was born were later immortalized in his trilogy, Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). As with Synge, O'Casey's first nights were occassions for rioting and were usually attended by more policeman than punters - The Plough and the Stars' overt criticism of Irish nationalism particularly enraged the Dublin audience. It was actually Yeats who had to lead the coppers' charge into the stalls to break up the fracas and he later harangued the audience, screeching that the very fact they had broken up his play meant that O'Casey was a genius, and that "this was his apotheosis"; O'Casey's journal records that while he smiled nervously and twiddled his thumbs backstage he couldn't wait to get home so that he could look up the word "apotheosis" in the dictionary. In 1928, after the rejecion of his play The Silver Tassie , dealing with World War I, O'Casey moved to England, eventually settling in Devon, where he wrote several plays on the subject of workers' struggles and injustice.
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