Romanticism versus Realism--Yeats and Kavanagh

There can be little doubt that, in terms of ability and achievement, the poet W. B. Yeats was a major ( perhaps THE major) influence on early 20th century Irish literature and his work came to be regarded as seminal far beyond Ireland's shores. Although he was older than both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Yeats was their contemporary, writing the major part of his poetic output between 1898 and 1939, the year of his death. Some critics have argued that not only was Yeats their equal, but in many ways surpassed them.

Yeats was a poetic giant who, more than anyone else, was responsible for the great literary flowering which took place in Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; a flowering which produced not only his own magnificent poetry, but also the Abbey Theatre and its towering dramatists, particularly John Millington Synge, whose play The Playboy of the Western World is an acknowledged masterpiece. The reasons why Ireland, a tiny colony of Great Britain at the time, should have produced such a literary renaissance are many and varied and have been written about extensively elsewhere, but suffice it to say that a national literature emerged: a literature which is still vibrant (and diverse) today.

The main focus of much of Yeats' poetry is on the potency of myth. The discovery (or re-discovery) of Irish mythology and folk-lore became an academic interest among some of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class who exerted political control over Ireland in the name of the British Crown, and many studies were published from the late 18th century onwards. It was this discovery of an ancient treasury of Gaelic myth, allied to the fairy-tales he had heard as a boy in Co. Sligo, which was to spur his poetic vision.

Yeats was not a realist, but a visionary. He was concerned with illumination, not illustration. The transcendental, the luminous, was the image he sought and largely found. He was, indeed, a High Romantic, eschewing the mundane.  A couple of examples may be permitted:

              Though I am old with wandering
              Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
              I will find out where she has gone,
              And kiss her lips and take her hands;
              And walk among long dappled grass,
              And pluck till time and times are done
              The silver apples of the moon,
              The golden apples of the sun.
             
              (from The Song of Wandering Aengus)

And again:

              Where the wave of moonlight glosses
              The dim grey sands with light,
              Far off by furthest Rosses
              We foot it all the night,
              Weaving olden dances,
              Mingling hands and mingling glances
              Till the moon has taken flight;
              To and fro we leap
              And chase the frothy bubbles,
              While the world is full of troubles
              And is anxious in its sleep.
              Come away, O human child!
              To the waters and the wild
              With a faery, hand in hand,
              For the world's more full of weeping
              than you can understand.
         
              (from The Stolen Child)

Clearly, as these examples show, the everyday was not a Yeatsian concern. Romanticism and mysticism was in his blood.

The monumental achievement of William Butler Yeats, however, had a somewhat debilitating effect on some of his predecessors. He was, as they say, a hard act to follow. He had carved for himself what many considered a virtually unassailable niche in Irish literary history; a niche which many Irish poets found daunting, even stifling. Some poets, notably Austin Clarke and Padraic Fallon, attempted to incorporate Yeatsian myth and romanticism into their work while also subverting it, but the real backlash was to arrive in the shape of Patrick Kavanagh. Kavanagh's background was the total opposite to the Protestant and patrician world of Yeats.

Born in 1905 in Co. Monaghan, Kavanagh's world was rural and Catholic, a farming community struggling to scratch a living from the "stony grey soil", to quote his own words. For the first 31 years of his life he attempted to provide for himself as a farmer in that community, not very successfully. However, in 1936, his first collection of poems, Ploughman and Other Poems, was published. It was not a critical success, but undaunted, he moved to Dublin in 1939 ( the year of Yeats' death) and pursued a somewhat uneven poetical career.

The poems in his first collection ( Ploughman etc,) were, with one or two notable exceptions such as "Inishkeen Road: July Evening", slight, if competent, pastoral pieces, lyrically extolling country life. There was little indication of the storm to come. Then, in 1942, Cuala Press published a long poem by Kavanagh called "The Great Hunger". This was not about the Irish Famine, as may be inferred from the title, but a powerful and stinging indictment of rural poverty and sexual repression. "The Great Hunger" gained Kavanagh some notoriety and he was condemned by the Catholic Church and the censors. The poem, whether consciously or not, was also a rejection of the highly-fashioned and transcendental poetry of Yeats and his imitators. It was written in powerfully realistic style, eschewing false sentimentality and poetical niceties. The opening section gives a flavour of what is to follow:
         
    Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
    Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move 
    Along the side-fall of the hill--Maguire and his men.   
    If we watch them an hour is there anything we can  prove
    Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book
    Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs
    And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear  of the 
    hedges, luckily.
    Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?   
    Or why do we stand here shivering?

    (from The Great Hunger)

The poem goes on to describe the dull mediocrity of Maguire's existence, devoid of stimulation and beset by the proscriptions of the Church in sexual matters:

      Patrick Maguire went home and made cocoa
      And broke a chunk off the loaf of wheaten bread;
      His mother called down to him to look again
      And make sure that the hen-house was locked.
      His sister grunted in bed.
      The sound of a sow taking up a new position.
      Pat opened his trousers wide over the ashes
      And dreamed himself to lewd sleepiness.
      The clock ticked on. Time passes.

It can be clearly seen that this kind of poetry was a million miles removed from the metrical precision and high-blown style of Yeats. It is a poetry of realism and experience, rather than a search for the inner soul, and it was to have a profound effect, both consciously and subconsciously, on the generation of poets who followed Kavanagh; poets such as Seamus Heaney, John Montague and even Paul Durcan. This is not to say that those poets were influenced directly by Kavanagh, but Kavanagh's poetry had a liberating effect which cleared the way for a poetry more attuned to personal experience and historical realities.

Of course, there is room in Irish literature for both traditions: the classical and visionary poetry as exemplified in the sheer beauty and metrical scope of Yeats and also the grounded-in-reality poetics of Patrick Kavanagh. Having said that, the divisions are not as clear-cut as they appear. That Yeats was capable of climbing down from the mystical heights is shown in his "political" poems, such as "Easter 1916" and "Meditations in Time of Civil War" and Kavanagh, despite his rural realism, could wax visionary in poems such as "Prelude" and "Canal Bank Walk."

Although both traditions remain in evidence in Irish poetry today, they are in reality vestigial. There is a great variety and diversity of style, content and poetic ambition among Ireland's poets, both among established masters of the art like Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Thomas Kinsella, and younger poets such as Paul Muldoon, Matthew Sweeney and Paula Meehan. Poetry is alive and flourishing in Ireland as never before and it is likely that Yeats and Kavanagh would approve.

Bibliography:

Collected Poems by Patrick Kavanagh (Norton, 1997)
Irish Poetry since 1950 by John Goodby (Manchester University Press 2000)
The Poems--W.B. Yeats ( Everyman Library, 1992)

Information regarding Yeats and Kavanagh and also the poems quoted can be found on http://oldpoetry.com/oauthor/list