Yeats and the flip side of a national icon

The singular poet had feet of clay, and it's foolish to pretend otherwise, but that does not diminish his literary genius

OUR NATIONAL POET: WB Yeats. Photo: NPA Collection

Anthony J Jordan

At a recent meeting organised by UCD at Newman House, Senator Susan O'Keeffe, chair of Yeats150, said that during this year of the celebrating of WB Yeats, the poet should also be challenged. Yeats is open to challenge in many areas. So here goes.

Yeats saw himself as a dramatic artist who was not bound by the normal social mores. He demonstrated this in several ways in his long collaboration with Lady Gregory. He claimed authorship of Cathleen Ni Houlihan in 1902 and later, in 1910, betrayed Gregory by allowing unfair criticism from Edmund Gosse to go unchallenged, lest he jeopardise his chance of getting a Civil List pension.