Yeats on Joyce

[Ian Livingston]

Um.  It was my impression that Yeats, born in Dublin, was a campaigner
for Irish culture who strongly supported the use of Gaelic in Ireland.
 Joyce poked freely at him for his boyish rejection of Anglican
culture.  Hard to think of him as "patrician," in spite of his later
posture of sagacity.  Joyce, on the other hand, moved away quickly to
Paris, from which vantage he picked at Ireland and the Irish with his
acerbic portrayals of the low-brow Dubliners.  I, of course, have no
great love for either Joyce or Yeats.  Maybe because I was raised
Anglican, maybe because I see them both as peevish, rather excitable
fellows.  Typical Irishmen, just a few pints short of loopy.  Not that
we Americans all that sober-minded.

On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 3:07 AM, Johnny Marr<marrja at gmail.com> wrote:
> I bet Joyce would have liked it even more: a patrician Anglican writer
> complaining about "the vulgarity of a single Dublin day", and who fails to
> have picked up on Joyce's less spiritualist but equally firm melding of myth
> and fact (and I type this as an acolyte of both WBY and JAAJ).
>
> On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 4:36 AM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I rather like the following criticism which is attributed by Richard
>> Ellman to Yeats writing in the 1926 A Vision about James Joyce in
>> particular.‘There is hatred of the abstract . . . The intellect turns upon
>> itself. . . . they either eliminate from metaphor the poet’s phantasy and
>> substitute a strangeness discovered by historical or contemporary research
>> or . . . break up the logical processes of thought by flooding them with
>> associated ideas or words that seem to drift into the mind by chance; or . .
>> . a lunatic among his keepers, a man fishing behind the gas works, the
>> vulgarity of a single Dublin day prolonged through 700 pages – and delirium
>> . . . It is as though myth and fact, united until the exhaustion of the
>> Renaissance, have now fallen so far apart that man understands for the first
>> time the rigidity of fact, and calls up, by that very recognition, myth.’
>>
>>
>
>