Yeats on Joyce

[Johnny Marr]

I would call Joyce Catholic on the grounds that he could never escape his
religious upbringing. Also bear in mind that much of Yeats' time in the
Irish Senate was spent trying to moderate the predominantly Catholic
policies and legislation - however much he believed in the church he was
raised in Yeats certainly felt it was important to represent them in case
they became overlooked and ostracised.

Joyce was an inveterate trouble maker who (despite the recognition of the
fallacies of patriotism in the Cyclops section of Ulysses) had a lingering
disregard for English protestantism that you might expect from a man who
grew up under British colonial rule. Therefore, whether or not he may have
enjoyed Yeats' poetry he would certainly have enjoyed winding up someone
from the 'oppressing' class, particularly one with a milder and more
snobbish temperament than his own and with an out of touch, far-fetched
mysticism. Dismissing the reportage of an ordinary Dubliner's life as mere
vulgarity is exactly the kind of haughty and elitist response Joyce would
have wanted to hear.

On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 8:02 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>wrote:

> Okay, I'll give you patrician.  Still, I think he was more Irish than
> Anglican.  And both men renounced their respective churches.  It is
> true that we all see the world according to the metaphors most deeply
> ingrained from youth, so you can, yes, on those terms call Yeats
> "Anglican" by the church of his upbringing, but then you must also
> call Joyce "Catholic."  Maybe it doesn't matter, really, a couple of
> Mics blowing foam against malt.
>
> On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Johnny Marr<marrja at gmail.com> wrote:
> > He was a member of the Irish Senate and an on-off sympathiser with the
> > aristocracy, of course he was patrician.
> >
> > On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> 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.’
> >> >>
> >> >>
> >> >
> >> >
> >
> >
>
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