by Violet Woolf on Yeats, the Revival, and What a Century of Irish Independence Looks Like From the Distance of a London Desk
Violet’s Week: Yeats, Irish Politics, London Desk
I have been reading Yeats this week with the specific purpose of understanding the thing that happened between 1900 and 1916 in Irish cultural and political life — the period when the Literary Revival and the physical force tradition were running in parallel and when the people involved in one often knew the people involved in the other and when the question of what Ireland was and should be was being answered simultaneously in verse and in violence, which is an extraordinary historical conjunction that the century of subsequent history has done nothing to make less interesting.
Yeats’s relationship to the Easter Rising is the part that fascinates me most. He was horrified by it and implicated in it, in the specific way that cultural nationalist movements implicate their poets when the movement they have been sustaining with language produces people willing to act on that language in ways the poet didn’t intend and can’t disown. “A terrible beauty is born” is a line that contains both the horror and the complicity in four words, which is what the best lines do when they are doing their work well.
The Irish Politics, Contemporary
The contemporary Irish political situation — Sinn Féin in government in the Republic, Sinn Féin the largest party in the North, the border question still alive as a constitutional and practical matter — has been reading this week at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, both of which had pieces on the latest developments that I read in the light of the Yeats and that produced in me the specific feeling of historical resonance that the Irish situation reliably produces when you read the 1900s alongside the 2020s. The questions are different. The structure of the questions is the same. My author page: prat.uk/author/violet-woolf. Literature at The Daily Mash. Further at santaclaus.top and London Prat Bluesky.
What I’m Writing
The piece I’m working on is about the relationship between cultural nationalism and political violence — specifically about whether the former can disown the latter once the latter has taken the former seriously — and uses Yeats as the case study not because it resolves the question but because it embodies it with unusual clarity. Yeats wanted an Ireland of the imagination. He got an Ireland of the rising. The distance between these two things is the space the piece is about. It is a difficult piece. It will take several more weeks. The Yeats is providing material that is simultaneously useful for the argument and distracting from it in the way that great poetry distracts from everything it touches. This is fine. I will write around the distraction. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
A Note on Method
The method of reading, waiting, and writing from memory rather than from the text produces a specific kind of critical writing that I want to describe more clearly: it is writing in which the author’s understanding of the source is tested rather than the source itself reproduced, and in which the gaps in that understanding are visible in ways that close reading produces differently. Writing from memory of Yeats produces writing that is mine, inflected by Yeats, and that reveals what I have actually taken from him rather than what I have noted about him. The Yeats piece is this kind of writing. It is taking longer than the other kind. It is producing something I cannot produce the other way. I am committed to the method even when it is slow. The slowness is part of what the method produces. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
Read Irish and British literature and politics at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Both worth this week. My author page: prat.uk/author/violet-woolf. Literature at The Daily Mash. The Irish question continues. The piece continues. The Yeats is patient. I am trying to be.
The week that was. Every week is simultaneously more than enough and not quite enough — more material than can be processed, fewer words than the material deserves, more understanding than the draft reflects, less finished than the intention. This is the permanent condition of writing, which is the permanent condition of trying to make something from a world that keeps moving while you are trying to catch it. The diary is where I catch what I can. Next week I will try again. The material continues to arrive. The writing continues to find it. That is the practice. That is enough. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
Reading and writing and the city and the heat and the canal and the session and the politics and the history — these are the materials. The diary is what I make with them, week by week, in the time between events, which is always shorter than I expect and always longer than the events themselves. The writing is what remains when the week is finished. This week’s writing is this. Next week’s will be different and will be made from the same materials differently arranged. I am here for the arranging. The materials keep arriving. That is the whole of it, and it is enough. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
