To write for my own race : the Irish response to W.B.Yeats in his lifetime

Abstract

This thesis examines the reception accorded to W. B. Yeats in Ireland during his lifetime. While the principal focus is on his literary work, due attention is also paid to the many political and cultural conflicts in which he became involved. The primary sources of material used in the thesis were the many newspapers and journals published in Ireland between 1885, when Yeats’s first poems were published in the Dublin University Review, and his death in January 1939. Much emphasis is placed on the fact that the material used gives a contemporary response to Yeats written often in haste and without the benefit of the hindsight available to later critics. In this way Yeats’s reputation in Ireland is captured as it developed chronologically over a period of remarkable change in that country. The changes occurring in the political and social life of Ireland are a constant backdrop to the study of the varying responses to his work whether in the literary or in other fields.