Yeats’s Debt to Anglo-Irish Dialect

Abstract

In declaring that evocation of feeling must be founded on the reality of things named — ‘the sensation directly inspired by the thing itself’ — Yeats was in the forefront of twentieth century critical opinion. Just such a principle was to inform, separately and in different ways, the poetic theory of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. But when Yeats first wrote about Anglo-Irish idiom as a model for the spoken word in literature, although he mentioned its syntax (‘turns of phrase out of the Gaelic’),¹ he did not understand how that syntax contributes to the concreteness which is such a marked characteristic of dialect usage. What distinguishes Yeats’s theory from Pound’s and Eliot’s is the fact that it is based on a living speech whose syntax lays greater emphasis on the noun than is normally found in standard English.

There are of course numerous Anglo-Irish dialects. To avoid linguistic discriminations which are beyond the scope of this book, I have accepted Yeats’s general reference to ‘the dialect’.