Literature and Politics

On 29 March 1921 W.B Yeats wrote to G.W. Russell, more commonly known as AE: ‘we writers are not politicians, the present is not in our charge but some part of the future is. Our speech will not make it very happy, but it will be even less happy than it might be perhaps if we are silent on vital points.’ This paper will examine the obligation that Yeats felt to ‘speak’ during the tumultuous years of the Easter Rising, the Anglo-Irish War, and the Civil War. It will scrutinise some of the forms that ‘speech’ took, particularly in terms of text, context and intertext, and the politics of its publication. By focussing on the purposes and processes of selected poems, prose and plays from the period, this paper offers itself as an intervention in the ongoing and wide-ranging debate about what is generally termed Yeats’s ‘politics’.