アイルランド人になりそこなったイェイツ

W. B. Yeats is generally known as a writer who worked very hard to achieve the Irish Literary Revival. However, many people in Ireland have never regarded him as Irish. From their viewpoint, Yeats is not always representative of the Irish literature. To understand their indifference toward him, we should recognize that Yeats's family belongs to the New English-the Anglo-Irish who came from England to Ireland after England conquered Ireland in the 17th century. By blood, his family is not related to the Gaelic-Irish. In addition, his family were Protestants, members of the Church of Ireland, an offshoot of the Church of England. Yeats's Protestant background placed him in the minority in an overwhelmingly Catholic Irish population. In terms of race and religion, Yeats cannot be a representative of Irish people. However, Yeats himself always regarded Ireland as his mother country. Many of his ancestors either hated English people or showed some sympathy for the plight of the Irish Catholics. With his emotional and intellectual attachment to Ireland, Yeats seems to satisfy Thomas Davis's notion of Irish nationality. Davis was a chief ideologue of the Young Ireland movement in 19th century; he preached that one who loves Ireland and works for Ireland can be an Irish even if one is not a Catholic or a Gaelic. Under the influence of John O'Leary, a sympathizer of Davis, Yeats came to have a commitment to produce first-rate literature for Ireland. However, he became disillusioned toward the Irish Catholic nationalist cause around the turn of the century, returning to an emphasis on the Anglo-Irish Protestant tradition in his writings. By emphasizing the superiority of the Anglo-Irish Protestant tradition, much of his works is the manifestation of the Anglo-Irish Protestant minority, removed from the culture of the Gaelic, Catholic, majority.

公開日:2010年1月24日で登録したコンテンツは、国立情報学研究所において電子化したものです。