Yeats, Celticism, and Comparative Science

William Butler Yeats wrote poetry and plays that were part and parcel of a quest to lead the Irish towards their ‘proper dark’, and the most important period in the formulation of his view of this ‘dark’ was that when he was most actively engaged in both the collection of folklore and the study of comparative anthropology — the 1890s. In the course of that decade (and the first few years of the 20th century), Yeats's understanding and vision of the Irish primitive past shifted from a romantically primitivist Celticism into something more self-critical, rigorous, and modernist. Presumably, the chief factor in this shift was his engagement with comparative science. This chapter traces how Yeats's attitude to folklore developed as his understanding of contemporary scientific debate about the origins of myth and religion grew. Ironically, his serendipitous eclecticism was to make the works of such scholars as Sir John Rhys, Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville, Edward Clodd, Alfred Nutt, Andrew Lang, and Sir James Frazer valuable material in the service of a romantic primitivism that flew in the face of most of their theories.

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Eclecticism · Face (sociological concept) · Folklore · Irish · Literature · Mythology · Romance · Social science · Sociology · Cultural History and Identity Formation · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Historical Studies of British Isles · History · Philosophy