1 - Swordsmen: W. B. Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid

Summary

From a long literary historical perspective, William Butler Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid can look almost like twins. Each was a poet and the central figure in a patriotically inflected literary movement that had its context in a wider cultural repudiation of English hegemony in the United Kingdom and a political challenge to the inclusion of their countries in that polity. Seeing poetry and controversy as allied activities, both writers were vigorous self-mythologisers whose interventions in public life were condemned as hubristic by their opponents. Yeats and MacDiarmid not only projected themselves as avatars of a resurgent phase in the history of their ancient nations but shared a vision of leadership by aesthetic example – their distinctively national poetry (and, in the Irish poet's case, drama) would give their compatriots an enhanced sense of the riches of the past and the possibilities of the future, while their propagandistic endeavours would at once energise their art and create the conditions for its reception. They even shared a response to disappointment in the latter objective, exploiting it as an occasion of querulous lyric eloquence.

On closer inspection, however, the parallels become less persuasive. Even if the Scottish Literary Renaissance inaugurated by MacDiarmid was modelled to a degree on the Irish Literary Revival led by Yeats, these were in important respects disparate phenomena, which took place in divergent circumstances.