LIKE the souls in his play, Purgatory, it has been Yeats's fate to relive his transgressions, and that not once but many times. Of all his transgressions, the attraction towards fascism has been the most widely debated, and many of these essays deal in whole or in part with that issue.
Jonathan Allison shows in his introduction that in the years immediately following the poet's death, Frank O'Connor, Joseph Hone and George Orwell wrote in explicit terms of what Hone termed Yeats's "hatred of democracy in the political and every other sense". However, the charge received its most developed enunciation in 1965, Yeats's centenary year, with the publication of Conor Cruise O'Brien's essay, "Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W.B. Yeats". The then literary editor of this newspaper, Terence de Vere White, recalled that "the print swam before my eyes".
O'Brien republished the essay in 1990 and it is again republished here (in edited form). One of O'Brien's arguments was that by listing "Ireland's strongman" Kevin O'Higgins, with Grattan, Parnell and Berkeley in a list of great Irishmen, Yeats was aligning himself with "what was most ruthless and implacable in the party of property: seventy seven executions and the famous words if necessary seven hundred and seventy seven. Yeats admired Mussolini from afar, but O'Higgins at home. The implication as to what O'Higgins might have become is clear.
However, the republication of the essay in 1990 was surprising in a number of respects. Not only were O'Brien's political writings by then being carried by a newspaper described in the essay as "a philistine bastion", but those writings had at their core a call for suppression of the IRA, something for which Kevin O'Higgins provides the most unambiguous precedent. By aligning himself with O'Higgins, Yeats had implied support for government executions during the Civil War. Would O'Brien still argue that actions taken by O'Higgins (with the presumed support of Yeats) to maintain the existence of the state in the face of IRA insurrection still constitute evidence of totalitarian tendencies on the part of both O'Higgins and Yeats?
One of the quotations taken by O'Brien from the Yeats letters (the date is 1933) refers to the poet "constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes". This is, of course, valid evidence of totalitarian leanings, but is even more explicit evidence of the central influence on Yeats of John O'Leary, whose words these probably are. They are certainly O'Leary's sentiments, and it is extraordinary that for all the incisiveness of many of these essays, none acknowledges that Yeats was not, as is so often presumed, exaggerating when he stated that "from these debates, from O'Leary's conversation, and from the Irish books he lent or gave me has come all I have set my hand to since
O'Leary, although an IRB man, was not a republican, instead believing, as he put it, that "a constitutional monarchy would be the best and safest form of government". Like Yeats, he looked on the 18th century - and in particular the place of Grattan's Parliament in it - as an exemplary era, and he was neither anti English nor anti Protestant, seeking instead to win Protestants for nationalism. Importantly for Yeats, he opposed all forms of land agitation, thus, by default at least, seeking to maintain the Anglo Irish aristocracy in existence.
Accordingly it could be said that Yeats's politics had as its foundation not 20th century totalitarianism but O'Learyite Fenianism. In any case, as Augustine Martin points out in his essay here, Yeats (again like O'Leary) had no fixed idea of revolution and far from holding Fascism as a final goal, conducted an unremitting dialectic, "a dialogue of self and soul in which each achieved statement furnished the energy for the articulation of its counter truth'."
One of the most successful attempts to keep all of Yeats in focus is that of Hazard Adams, who argues here that Yeats's nationalism was "antithetical", which essentially meant accepting that there are three sides to every argument and that "triumph over the opposite would merely create a new suppression". Thus in the theatre - always for Yeats a primary site for cultural nationalism - he sought to "proceed antithetically", creating a theatre of opposing values and forms.
The final essay is an attempted refutation by Ronald Bush of arguments put forward by Terry Eagleton and W.J. McCormack, both described as Marxists. Yet although both have their views summarised and McCormack's book, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo Irish Literary History, is referred to by many contributors, neither he nor Eagleton is allowed to speak in his own words through having an essay included. Otherwise this is a well edited and critically important collection.