"Fiery Speech": Vision and Violence in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Patrick Pearse

Lyall, Scott

Abstract

This paper examines the work of two of the main protagonists behind the cultural and political revival of Ireland in the early twentieth century, W. B. Yeats and Patrick Pearse, looking particularly at some of the religious and spiritual ideas and emotions forming the foundation to their poetry.While Yeats memorialises Pearse, and other 1916 martyrs, in ‘Easter, 1916’, a poem that is in many ways a reply to Pearse’s ‘The Fool’, their respective visions of what the new Ireland should look like – Pearse’s traditional ‘peasant’ Catholicism and Yeats’s heterodox elite Protestantism − were very different. Yet in many of their poems Yeats and Pearse inhabit the persona of prophet or visionary, with what Pearse in ‘The Rebel’ calls ‘the gift of fiery speech’. Their poems, especially those on Ireland, often display a violent anger and outrage that, even so, shares the ultimate aim of resacralising Ireland.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: ESSE 2016
• Start Date: Aug 22, 2016
• End Date: Aug 26, 2016
• Deposit Date: Dec 18, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 18, 2017
• Keywords: Irish literature, poetry, nationalism,
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1020766
• Contract Date: Dec 18, 2017