Irish Poetry of the First World War

In his poem “On Being Asked for a War Poem” (1915), the Nobel laureate W. B. Yeats (b. 1865–d. 1939) expressed the view that “in times like these” he thought “it better” that “A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth| We have no gift to set a statesman right.” In the introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935 (1936), which he edited, Yeats rejected many of those poets associated with the Great War, chief among them Wilfred Owen, because he considered “passive suffering” unsuitable for poetry. “In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced,” he affirmed. The truth is that many thousands of Yeats’s fellow Irishmen fought and died in World War I. Kathleen Tynan, one of Yeats’s early supporters and friends and a well-known poet and writer of the time, had two sons who fought in the war. Her poem and collection titled Flower of Youth (1915) was hugely popular in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, while other Irish poets who were well known to Yeats fought in the war, such as Thomas MacGreevy, who was twice wounded. The presence of the war and its widespread impact on the lives of so many families from all classes and religious backgrounds became ensnared in the politics and military struggle for national independence that eventually led, after the war, to two separate and somewhat mutually hostile jurisdictions on the island with two competing “master” narratives, those of Irish nationalism and Ulster unionism. In the fifty or so years that followed Irish independence (1922), that is, up to the early 1970s, the experience of World War I proved hugely problematic, particularly in regard to civic commemoration, and it divided public recognition in the Irish Free State—later the Irish Republic—between those who had suffered the loss of family and those who survived and whose stories were considered to have no place in the new Irish state. There were Irish writers, however, who had left behind a poetic legacy based upon their time fighting (and dying) in regiments of the British army, among them, Thomas Kettle and Francis Ledwidge; others, such as Patrick McGill, C. S. Lewis, and Monk Gibbon, suffered both physical and mental scars. Still others, including Winifred Letts, witnessed firsthand as a nurse the tragedy as it unfolded. Generally speaking, in Ireland the subject of World War I and its impact within the country became taboo, except for Remembrance Sunday, which was commemorated in Northern Ireland. From the soldiers who were published poets before they joined up in the early days of the Great War to those reimagining the conflict and its personal meanings long after, and notwithstanding Yeats’s undoubted opposition and disfavor toward war as a befitting subject of tragedy, Irish literature produced its own powerful tradition. World War I and Irish poetry was no longer the self-excluding subject it once had been.

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