This essay explores the Irish Literary Revival in relation to the poetry and philosophy of W. B. Yeats and science. When we examine Yeats’s view of science and his repudiation of Locke and Newton, among others, in poetry, it is easy to come to the understanding that the poet was wholly anti-materialist and anti-scientific and brought this to bear on his espousal of the Irish Revival. However, this essay argues that what Yeats does in his thinking, rather, is reverse the understanding of science as ordered. For Yeats, the self-conscious application of materialism is a fallacy and he rejects such determinism in favour of a multidimensional world view that is in accordance with the new physics of his day. In this way, the cultural revival in its appropriation of the Gaelic past becomes filled with the potency of past, present, and future as one, and this symbolic efficacy allows for an expression of nationality that is ultimately a form of consciousness, a new world view made manifest through what Schrödinger terms ‘a return to antiquity’.

This chapter examines a lesser-studied element of Wallace’s intertextual engagement: his engagements with poets, poetry and poetics. Although he once claimed that he was “not talented enough” to be a poet, Wallace’s writing was deeply immersed in and often concerned with questions to do with the nature of poetry and the figure of the poet. Some of his titles refer or allude to specific poems – from “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (George Berkeley) to The Pale King (John Keats) – while other texts, such as the short story “Here and There,” use the idea of poetry to explore the relationship between language and experience, expression and form. In his longer works, too, Wallace uses particular poets in interesting (often entertaining) ways – W. H. Auden in The Broom of the System, for example, and Emily Dickinson in Infinite Jest. In interviews and essays, Wallace declared an interest in a wide range of poets, from W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore and Philip Larkin to Bill Knott and Stephen Dobyn. Taken together, these and further examples suggest that a more detailed account of Wallace’s writing on and about poetry will fill a particular gap in the understandings of his work.

In her writings, Vernon Lee at times formulates the spirit of place as a transhistorical, gynocentric paganism, but a number of her contemporaries took on a more explicit consideration of the pagan as a site of feminist self-realization. Chapter 5 turns fromworks about the spirit of moving through place to works addressing another form of movement: actual pagan ritual. Enmeshed within both the London decadent community and New Woman politics, Moina Mathers and Florence Farr were also among the most influential occultists of the pagan revival. These two leaders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn developed ecological models in which human-centred measures of space and time are replaced by an understanding of the self as an evanescent engagement within an occult ecology. Taking a lesson from painter Frederick Sandys, this chapter is not about searching for occult symbols in decadent art or literature. Rather, it addresses the decadent spirit within occult works aimed, in part, at destabilizing modern gender inequality.

The 1999 publication of Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (translation, 2004) accorded Ireland and Irish writers an unusually high profile among world literature studies. In chapter 10 of that volume, entitled “The Irish Paradigm,” Casanova foregrounded the achievement of the Irish Literary Revival as what she termed “a compact history of the revolt against the literary order.” This chapter examines the value and limitations of Casanova’s reading as part of a broader examination of the pertinence of terms such as “national,” “international” and “transnational” with respect to Irish writing. It focuses on three case studies: firstly, the historical relationship between Irish fiction and the subject of empire, as exemplified by the work of nineteenth-century novelist Maria Edgeworth. Secondly, it examines the work of W.B. Yeats, most famous writer of the Irish Revival, and his critical status as poet of decolonization and exemplar of transnational poetics. Finally, the transnational character of contemporary Irish fiction is discussed, including recent writings by writers Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Mike McCormack and Melatu Uche Okorie.

When W. B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, he singled out his contribution to theatre as one of his main achievements. The critical consensus since his death has not shared this view, and his theatrical work has largely been overlooked. This book contends that Yeats is not only an important modernist playwright, but also a thinker about theatre whose originality can be compared to that of Brecht or Artaud.

One of the most significant moves by Yeats in creating his late style is a new form of adjectival description. It uses a sequence of (often complex, often anomalous) adjectives to describe a single phenomenon, e.g., ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea’. These sequences provoke us to understand the thought process that creates each of the adjectives: How can a sea be ‘torn’? How can a sea be ‘tormented’ by a gong? (These are new aspects of the sea ‘of mire and blood’: ‘torn’ makes it a wounded body, ‘tormented’ makes it a wounded soul.) The two agents – dolphin and gong – are likewise redefined. Instead of being merely the bearers of souls, the dolphins become cruelly aggressive goads to the reluctant body, forcing it towards Byzantium, and the gong, instead of being merely an indicator of midnight, becomes a last call of impending physical death. I begin with early ‘simple’ single adjectives (‘lovely’, ‘dim’), often used repetitively, and then consider the later adjectives, offering many perspectives at once, turning the reader’s gaze from aspect to aspect. An altogether higher order of intellectuality generates these, requiring intense attempts to follow the successive aspects being identified.

In 1852, Wagner described his text for the Ring cycle as “the greatest poem that has ever been written.” This chapter asks to what extent the musical innovations – responding to historical linguistics – were formative for a generation of writers as well as composers. To what extent did innovation in one medium engender innovative techniques in another? After contextualizing Wagner’s operatic reforms within his early writings and related moments within the history of the genre, it explores a cornucopia of modernist writers working in the shadow of the Ring cycle: from Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, and Aubrey Beardsley, to Yeats, Mann, and Beckett; from Mallarmé and Dujardin to Zola and Proust, to name but a few. It traces the profound influence on literature of leifmotivic techniques, as “carriers of feeling,” amid the shift to words as a dereferentialized system of signs. The role of alliteration, direct parody, interior monologue, and involuntary memory all contribute to the overall view that appropriation and influence of “reformist” techniques in literature and linguistics remained in the hands of authors, regardless of Wagner’s predictions for his own literary greatness.

Marriage was often afforded high status as a societal stabiliser in newly-established states and the Irish Free State, operative from 1922, was no exception. Unlike Northern Ireland which adopted the parliamentary system of divorce, the Irish Free State provided no mechanism for private bills of divorce to proceed. Although a range of opines existed on divorce provision, the government sought advice from the Irish Catholic hierarchy whose position was steadfast: there should be no mechanism to divorce in the new state. Although there was no popular call for divorce in the new state, as Yeats infamously highlighted, removing the already restrictive parliamentary route from Irish petitioners raised concerns about minority rights in the new state. Subsequent consideration of divorce was often religiously charged but, as in both Westminster and Northern Ireland, this lacked a regimented religious or party divide. Divorce was subsequently banned in the 1937 Irish constitution and divorcees and those seeking divorce law reform were frequently lampooned by the Catholic church as morally suspect.