By T.S. Flynn

W.B. Yeats spent much of his life mistrusting constitutional nationalism and the men who practised it. Yet the poet who mocked shopkeepers, doubted parliamentarians and wrestled with the legacy of 1916 ultimately found himself helping to build the institutions of the Irish Free State.

For a man who spent much of his life mistrusting politicians, W.B. Yeats left behind a surprisingly substantial parliamentary record.

The public Yeats is remembered as a poet, dramatist and cultural nationalist. The parliamentary Yeats is less prominent in popular memory. Yet from the foundation of the Irish Free State, he occupied a seat in Seanad Éireann, speaking on subjects as varied as censorship, divorce, education, coinage and minority rights.

The apparent contradiction is revealing. Few figures were more closely associated with the imaginative project of Irish nationalism. Few were more sceptical of the compromises and calculations required by constitutional politics. Yet few intellectuals of his generation became so deeply involved in the ordinary business of government.

The story of Yeats's relationship with politics is therefore not merely a story about a poet. It is also a story about the tensions that ran through Irish nationalism itself.

The roots of that tension lay in the aftermath of Charles Stewart Parnell's fall. For constitutional nationalists, Parnell's collapse represented a political calamity. For Yeats, it created an opening. Parliamentary Ireland appeared exhausted by scandal, factionalism and procedural quarrels. Where others saw political failure, Yeats saw the possibility of cultural renewal.

The Irish Literary Revival emerged from that moment. If politicians could not create a nation through parliamentary arithmetic, perhaps artists could create one through mythology, folklore and imagination. Yeats came to believe that culture might succeed where politics had faltered.

From the outset, however, his vision differed markedly from that of the Home Rule movement. Constitutional politics depended upon organisation, compromise and electoral majorities. Yeats preferred symbols, heroes and dramatic gestures. Parliament sought practical concessions; poets sought transformation.

The distinction was partly social. Yeats viewed the emerging Catholic commercial classes with considerable suspicion. In 1913 his frustrations boiled over. Dublin's merchant elite resisted Hugh Lane's campaign to establish a municipal gallery of modern art, while many among respectable middle-class opinion remained hostile to organised labour during the great Dublin Lockout.

Yeats responded with September 1913, one of the sharpest attacks in modern Irish literature upon what he regarded as the narrowness of respectable nationalist Ireland:

"…fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence …"

The lines have endured because they captured more than a dispute over art or labour. They revealed a profound divide between a poet searching for grandeur and a society increasingly concerned with practical affairs.

Yet Yeats's criticism contained an irony.

The constitutional nationalists he regarded as uninspiring were, by the early twentieth century, achieving results.

John Redmond lacked the theatrical appeal of the Revivalists, but his strategy possessed a certain political logic. Through negotiation, discipline and parliamentary pressure, the Home Rule movement had brought Irish self-government closer than at any point since the Act of Union. By 1914 Home Rule had passed Westminster, even if its implementation would be postponed by war.

This uncomfortable reality would later shadow Yeats's response to revolution. If constitutional politics was already advancing the nationalist cause, what role remained for heroism and sacrifice?

The First World War exposed another fault line. Redmond encouraged Irish participation in the conflict as part of a broader constitutional bargain with Britain. Military service was presented as an act that would strengthen Ireland's claim to self-government.

Yeats remained detached from both the imperial cause and the political calculations surrounding it.

In An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, written after the death of Robert Gregory, son of Lady Gregory, he presents a figure almost entirely removed from public causes. The airman famously declares:

Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;

Later, he goes further:

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.

The phrase "public men" carried an obvious resonance in wartime Ireland. Redmond and his supporters were publicly urging Irishmen to enlist in support of a constitutional strategy. Whether Yeats intended a direct reference or not, the poem strips away both the rhetoric of empire and the language of political obligation. The pilot is moved instead by a "lonely impulse of delight".

As so often in Yeats's work, the solitary heroic figure appears more compelling than parties, movements or crowds.

Then came Easter 1916.

The Rising forced Yeats to confront a possibility he had largely avoided. Ideas cultivated in literature could acquire consequences beyond literature. The language of sacrifice and heroic nationalism no longer belonged exclusively to poems and plays. It had entered public life in the most dramatic fashion imaginable.

No figure represented this dilemma more sharply than Major John MacBride.

MacBride occupied a uniquely uncomfortable place in Yeats's imagination. He had fought against the British in South Africa and later participated in the Easter Rising. He was also the estranged husband of Maud Gonne, the great unfulfilled passion of Yeats's life.

Yeats's private opinion of him was severe. He regarded MacBride as a coarse and destructive figure who had caused profound hurt to people close to him.

Yet Easter 1916 contains one of the most remarkable acts of generosity in Irish literature.

Yeats acknowledges MacBride's flaws but ultimately concedes that history had altered him. Of the man he had spent years disparaging, he wrote:

He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

The word "terrible" remains as significant as the word "beauty".

Unlike many later commemorations, Yeats's poem is infused with uncertainty. He admires the courage of the Rising's leaders while simultaneously questioning the necessity of their sacrifice. His observation that "England may keep faith" hints at an awkward possibility: constitutional nationalism had already secured much of what it sought before the rebellion occurred.

The question lingers throughout the poem. If self-government was already within reach, what precisely had bloodshed achieved?

Yeats never entirely resolved the matter.

Instead, he became increasingly conscious of another problem. Myths, once released into politics, acquire a life independent of their creators. He would spend much of his later life reflecting on whether works such as Cathleen ni Houlihan had contributed to a romantic cult of sacrifice among younger nationalists.

By the 1920s, however, such questions were accompanied by more immediate concerns.

Ireland emerged from revolution not as a mythical Celtic commonwealth but as the Free State: constitutional, bureaucratic and dependent upon compromise. The realities of statehood presented questions that cultural nationalism alone could not answer.

Yeats's response was revealing.

Rather than retreating into artistic isolation, he entered public life. Appointed to Seanad Éireann in 1922, he became an active participant in debates concerning education, censorship, minority rights and the cultural identity of the State. He helped shape the design of Irish coinage and emerged as one of the most articulate defenders of intellectual freedom and Protestant interests within the new political order.

Most famously, during debates on divorce in 1925, he delivered a powerful defence of Ireland's Protestant minority:

"We against whom you have done this thing are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe."

The Seanad offered possibilities that the theatre and the poetry collection did not.

There is a tendency to place Parnell, Redmond, Yeats and the revolutionaries into separate and competing traditions. The historical reality was less tidy. The parliamentary movement created the framework within which self-government became possible. The cultural revival supplied much of the language through which the nation imagined itself.

By the time Yeats entered the Seanad, he was no longer merely the poet of heroic possibilities. He was helping to shape the institutions of the State that emerged from them.

It is one of the quieter ironies of Irish history that the author of September 1913, who once dismissed the world of practical politics as spiritually barren, spent a considerable part of his later life engaged in its daily business.

About the Author

Tim (T.S.) Flynn is an Interim CFO, historian of the Irish diaspora and author of Part an Irishman. Raised in Lancashire and now living in Brisbane, he writes on Irish history, politics, migration and the global Irish experience.

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