Irish Writing Final Exam: Easter 1916

Easter Rising

armed uprising in Ireland in 1916: Irish republicans tried to end British rule and establish an independent Irish Republic (seized public buildings, street barricades)

Date of the Rising

April 24-29, 1916

Mentioned Figures in the Rising (4)

(1) James Connolly, (2) Patrick Pearse, (3) John MacBride, (4) Thomas MacDonagh

Denis Donoghue

The poem contains ‘extraneous matter’ → ideas that don’t fit neatly into what an elegy is supposed to be

The poem is an “impure” elegy because Yeats mixes mourning with doubt and political questioning

• references Benedetto Croce: ‘every true work of art has violated some established kind’

Stephan Regan

Criticizes how Yeats has been taught in the UK and US (practical and new criticism) as they overly focus on the poem’s formal features as opposed to its historical context

Seamus Deane

Yeats mythologizes the Rising and turns his aesthetic worldview into politics, but this makes his revolutionary thinking unstable and politically shallow.

• Focuses too heavily on the mythologization of Irish identity and fails to consider the relevance of class politics

John Wilson Foster

The poem is Yeats trying to stand between admiration and doubt; the structure reflects Yeats’s personal guilt and intimacy with the leaders

Edmund Burke

The sublime is the emotional experience where fear/terror and awe/beauty exist at once

• “No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear”

Terry Eagleton

Literature is never neutral; even beauty and form carry ideology. Art can disguise political argument as “pure” aesthetic feeling

Franz Fanon

In colonial contexts, revolutionary violence can be seen as a necessary means of reclaiming identity and freedom, though it leaves psychological and moral scars