Return to Article Details A Variety of Responses to and Engagement with J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats in American Literary Works

In The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism under the chapter heading “Irish American Modernism” Joe Cleary writes: “In 1932, when W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw were founding the Irish Academy of Letters, Shaw nominated Eugene O’Neill and T. E. Lawrence to become associate members.” O’Neill was delighted, Cleary continues, quoting from the letter the playwright sent to his son on the occasion: “‘I regard this as an honor, whereas other Academies don’t mean much to me. Anything with Yeats, Shaw, A. E., O’Casey, Flaherty, Robinson in it is good enough for me’” (2014, 174). In this list Yeats (1865-1939) comes first, indicating O’Neill’s (1888-1953) reverence for the Irish poet playwright, since 1923 holder of the Noble Prize which the American playwright would receive in 1936. Both Yeats and O’Neill were pioneering modernist playwrights and in the past decades a number of scholars have been studying contact points between their dramaturgies. From among them Frederick S. Lapisardi’s findings are the most useful for the purpose of this essay. He highlights the use of the mask on stage both playwrights attached great importance to and discussed in their respective essays. The critic also states that Yeats did not influence O’Neill directly, although it is a fact that both writers were exploring the possibilities of the mask on stage (Lapisardi 1996, 135). A unique manifestation of this ambition is the notable parallel between “on-stage personality changes through masks in Emer [The Only Jealousy of Emer] and The Great God Brown” (Lapisardi 1996, 137)—the plays were written in 1919 and 1925 respectively. If not direct contact, there certainly existed a link between the two masters through their drawing inspiration from a common source, the dramaturgical principles of Gordon Craig. Yeats worked with Craig extensively while O’Neill’s familiarity with Craig’s book The Theatre Advancing and the essays on the mask it contains can also be confirmed (Lapisardi 1996, 136-37).

The young O’Neill, as research widely demonstrates, saw the Abbey productions in 1911 on their first visit to the United States, and admired the plays of Synge (1872-1909) above all. As Brenda Murphy claims, the Abbey Players’ realism was to prove most influential on the American theatre, and particularly on the young generation of writers who were just beginning to discover the drama as the most exciting form in which to develop their talents while participating in the nascent movement towards the modern in all arts that was concentrated in New York’s Greenwich village. Departing from this very welcome contextualization of O’Neill’s decisive theatre experiences, Murphy continues: “Two of these writers, Eugene O’Neill and Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), who were to become significant playwrights for the Village’s Provincetown Players, gratefully acknowledged the influence of Synge and the tours of the Irish National Theatre on their work” (2009, 167). In this essay I am going to make a survey of the influence of Synge and Yeats on and inspiring resonances with some writers’ and poets’ works in the United States. The area proves undoubtedly huge, therefore the ideas and conclusions presented here can only aspire to providing the basis of further research into forms of appropriation, under which heading Julie Sanders includes the “gesture towards the source text(s),” “creative borrowings” as well as “allusions” and “intertextual game(s)” (32-36). Most of the writers I am going to deal with had/have Irish roots or connections and belonged to a loosely defined Irish-American modernism, but some other writers engage with Synge and Yeats, or both, because of feeling attracted to their multiple-sided and nuanced contribution to world literature and theatre.

The influence of Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) on O’Neill’s early one-act plays, which he based on his own experiences at sea is widely documented in scholarship. Synge lived among fishermen and their families on the Aran Islands for lengthy periods in the late 1900s; despite his closeness to and mixing with them in their daily activities, he felt being an outsider and the Aran people who, friendly as they behaved, treated him as one too. O’Neill’s experiences during his working among sailors was similar: “He had lived with them, listened to them, tried to understand them, and was welcomed among them, although there was never any question that he was one of them” (Murphy 2009, 168). In her already quoted book chapter Murphy and the Hungarian scholar Péter Egri in his relevant essay, to name but two of the critics on the subject, testify to Synge’s influence on O’Neill. They offer brief analyses of the varyingly conspicuous Syngean traces in several plays of O’Neill including Bound East for Cardiff (1914), The Moon of the Caribbees (1916-17), Where the Cross Is Made (1918), Chris Christopherson (1919), The Hairy Ape (1922), The Iceman Cometh (1939), A Touch of the Poet (1935-42) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1941-43). Regarding the play Anna Christie (1921) both scholars quote a common source, a seminal monograph by Louis Sheaffer from 1968, who referred to an Irish actress, Eileen Curran’s remark to the playwright about the drama reminding her of Synge’s tragedy, Riders to the Sea. O’Neill acknowledged his indebtedness to Synge readily and said that it would take to be Irish to recognize the Irish resonances in Anna Christie (Murphy 2009, 168; Egri 1987, 264). The two scholars foreground this incident yet neither Murphy, nor Egri undertake an in-depth discussion of the Syngean echoes in Anna Christie.

Anna Christie is a reworking of Chris Christopherson; the playwright made several alterations in the earlier drama after the death of his father, the actor James O’Neill in 1920, the event being a watershed for the son. In my reading Anna Christie shows parallels not only with Riders to the Sea but also a good number of resonances with The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Anna’s father, Chris Christopherson originating from Sweden, is captain on a barge, whose life, like that of the community in Riders to the Sea, depends on the whims of the sea that has provided him with a job since his youth. Reminiscent of Maurya’s lament for the loss of her husband, her sons and father-in-law to the sea, Chris reports very similar experiences about the unpredictably destructive power of the sea, bringing early death to the men working on ships and their families: “All men in our village on coast, Sveden, go to sea. Ain’t nutting else for dem to do. My fad’er die on board ship in Indian Ocean. … De my tree bro’der, older’n me, dey go on ships. Den Ay go, too. Den my mo’der she’s left all ‘lone. She dies pooty quick after dat—all ‘lone” (O’Neill 1988, 981). Not unlike that of Synge’s women characters in Riders to the Sea, Chris’s attitude to the sea involves ambivalent feelings; he expresses love for it while several times, including the closing line of the play, he calls the sea “an old devil” which can play dirty tricks with people.

Resonances with The Playboy are obvious from the start of Anna Christie, demonstrated by subtle correspondences between the two dramatic texts. The American counterpart of Synge’s west of Ireland setting, an untidy country public-house or shebeen, is a saloon in an unfashionable area of New York City, which serves drinks to working class people. The three main characters of Anna Christie are Chris, Anna, and Mat Burke of Irish descent, a young, muscular stoker on ships. Early in the drama, after a long-term illness she comes to her father seeking shelter and is staying on the barge in the harbor when Mat Burke appears there. Having spent days on the open sea in a boat following a shipwreck, his arrival resembles Christy’s escape in The Playboy: Mat is also deadly tired, hungry and thirsty. Anna attends to his immediate needs like Pegeen to Christy’s in the other play, and then a conversation unfolds between them which resonates with nuances of the Syngean text, for instance in Mat’s reaction to Anna’s suspicion that he is perhaps a “lady-killer”: “I’m a hard, rough man and I’m not fit, I am thinking, to be kissing the shoe-laces of a fine, decent girl the like of yourself” (O’Neill 1988, 987). He is wooing Anna in a language very similar to Christy’s poetic Hiberno-English. “I’m telling you there’s the will of God in it that brought me safe through the storm and fog to the wan spot in the world where you was!” (O’Neill 1988, 991) Mat says, which echoes the wording of Christy’s love confession, enhanced by religious connotations: “Me there toiling a long while, and walking a long while, not knowing at all I was drawing all times nearer to this holy day” (Synge 1968, 151).

As in The Playboy, generational conflicts form an important part of the plot. Anna complains that her father abandoned her when she was a child, already motherless, allowing her to grow up on the farm of relatives without parental love and care, which led to her choice of prostitution after a cousin had raped her rather than working herself to shreds among hostile people. Learning that Mat would like to marry Anna, Chris opposes the plan fiercely, forbidding his daughter to be wed to a sailor and repeat the lonely destiny of the women in his family. In his monograph on O’Neill, Stephen A. Black raises the point that while revising the former play the character of Anna, as the playwright later explained, “forced herself on him.” Moreover, the new Anna became shaped to share certain traits with O’Neill himself and, the critic states, “she represents Eugene’s feelings during his long, intermittent war with his father” (Black 1999, 261, 263). Synge’s protagonist, Christy also can be seen as a self-portrait, a storytelling artist who does not really belong anywhere. Suffering from the oppressive and negligent behavior of her father Anna bears kinship with both Christy and Pegeen in The Playboy. In another sense, Anna proves to be only Christy’s counterpart. When she tells the truth about her past life as a prostitute Mat, much like Pegeen, reacts according to conventional morality and turns away from her, a lying slut who cheated him. However, the lovers do not lose each other for good: Mat comes back and after struggling with himself for a while he finally believes Anna’s claim that she is not the same person as she was before since Mat’s love has changed her. Christy’s reconciliation with his father in The Playboy is recalled by the reconciliation between Anna and Chris, which also has a touch of mystery in that closing the play Anna’s father refers to the sea as the dangerous but omniscient guide of human life. This kind of happy ending, different from Synge’s ambiguous closure, is undoubtedly rare in O’Neill’s dramatic oeuvre and some critics have found it unjustified. As Black interprets it, for O’Neill the play was “both an act of mourning for his father and a denial of death and loss” (1999, 263).

Djuna Barnes, the other writer associated with the Provincetown Players and indebted to Synge, authored a newspaper article on the Irish playwright as early as 1917 under the aptly musical title “The Songs of Synge.” In this she expresses a distinctly clear view of Synge’s unique style, pinpointing that “he realized that grim brutality and frankness and love are one, the upper lip is romance, but the under is irony.” Barnes elaborates on the lyrical beauty of Deirdre’s lines in Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910), asserting that “What the poets of the Elizabethan age were doing for England, Synge was doing for Ireland,” which places Synge’s achievement very high and over generic borders. Her other favorite work by Synge appears to have been The Well of the Saints (1905), which carried personal meaning for her: “sometimes I also do not want to be awakened from the certain joyous blindness that was Synge’s” (Barnes 1917). As Murphy notes, three of her plays were produced by the Players in the 1919-1920 season including Kurzy of the Sea (1919) and The Irish Triangle (1920) where the Irish influence is obvious. Kurzy of the Sea, Murphy asserts, “owes a good deal to The Playboy. […] Like Christy Mahon, Rory [a dreamy young man] becomes empowered when a young woman displays her attraction to him, and he goes off, having shaken off his seeming enchantment by romantic stories, determined to win Kurzy [a barmaid] as his wife” (2009, 169-70). Parallel with the happy ending in O’Neill’s Anna Christie, the resolution of her play also involves the prospective union of lovers. Murphy concludes her discussion of Barnes’s plays admitting that they were “all apprentice work,” leading the author toward the formation of a “truly original Irish-American character, Dr Matthew O’Connor […] in her classic modernist novel, Nightwood ” [1936], in which “Barnes transforms the elements of ‘Irishness’ that she saw in Synge’s work into a uniquely conceived character” (2009, 170-71). In Nightwood the two young male protagonists are an Irishman, doctor O’Connor, and Baron Felix, a Jew, both travelling across Germany and France like Synge did in search of their complex identity.

Synge and Yeats also feature in works by African American writers who took part in the cultural activities and contributed to the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. In his book chapter “Globalizing the Harlem Renaissance: Irish, Mexican and ‘Negro’ Renaissances in The Survey and Survey Graphic” Robert Johnson calls attention to the survey of the Irish Renaissance and its major representatives on the pages of American magazines alongside their view of the Harlem Renaissance. For instance, the essay “Irish Anticipations” was published in The Survey in 1921 as part of a series, providing information for the readers to recognize “the common concern with (re)defining the proper relationship between race and nation” in the parallel renaissances, albeit the conceptions underlying these showed differences (Robert Johnson 2006, 177). Shortly afterwards, the African American poet James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) edited and published an anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). In the “Preface” to the collection he says: “What the colored poet in the United States needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without,” and then adds: “He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor; a form expressing the imagery, the idioms, the peculiar turns of thought, and the distinctive humor and pathos, too, of the Negro” (James Weldon Johnson 1922). The poet author of the preface to the anthology emphasizes the need for a new form and style to represent the consciousness of African Americans, considering Synge as a precursor with his unique combinations of opposites and an innovative creation of an idiosyncratically artistic language in his work.

Claude McKay (1889-1948), a Jamaican-born poet related to the Harlem Renaissance started to write his first pieces in the Jamaican dialect. They deserve attention, Lee M. Jenkins claims, “as early examples of a demotic and provincial poetics of modernism also practiced by Hugh MacDiarmid in Scotland and John Millington Synge in Ireland” (2003, 279). An early McKay poem, “The Hermet” is described by Jenkins as “A Carribean version of Irish pastoral, [which] echoes and adapts to its own indigenous environment Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’” and like “Innisfree” it is also addressed to the countryside from the capital (2003, 281-82), the speaker planning to go back to a point of origin. However, Jenkins continues, the later poem “stresses its Carribean difference from its Yeatsian original in its diction” which is moving between standard English and “Jamaican or creole” (2003, 282). Notably, it is also a difference that the landscape McKay evokes as a place of retreat for the speaker is less idealized than Innisfree in Yeats’s poem; indeed, the final stanza emphasizes that he will feel sadness and loneliness upon return:

"An’ in my study I shall view de wul’,
An’ learn of its doin’s to de full;
List to the woodland creatures’ music sweet—
Sad, yet contented in my lone retreat."
(1912)

A later poem in McKay’s oeuvre from 1922 seems to write back to Yeats’s famously enigmatic and widely interpreted lines about the dancer at the end of “Among School Children”: “O body, swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (1965, 245). In “The Harlem Dancer” by McKay the closing sentence points to the dichotomy of illusion-making and the sad reality behind the mask of a presumably black girl’s entertaining an audience who pay for her performance: “But looking at her falsely smiling face / I knew her self was not in that strange place” (1977, 518). Yeats’s metaphysical question has its down-to-earth echo in McKay’s poem, which highlights a severe racial and social issue under the mask of compliance with the given situation.

African American literary engagements with one of the two Irish modernists this essay focuses on occurred after the 1920s as well. In his essay, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) addresses the author of an article on African American folklore, pointing to the ambiguities of the field. He dwells on the black-face tradition in particular as a paradoxical influence on Black folklore, and also on the necessity of wearing a mask in the expression of American identity more generally. Ellison quotes Yeats on the role of the mask in not only art but also in human life: “If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are and assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves, … Active virtue, as distinct from the passive acceptance of a current code, is the wearing of a mask. It is the condition of an arduous full life” (Yeats The Autobiography 1969, 317). Ellison adapted the Yeatsian notions about the productive nature of the mask and the self versus anti-self dichotomy to his understanding the roots of American identity: “for the ex-colonials the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it … gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, … masking is a play upon possibility and ours is a society in which possibilities are many.” His succinct conclusion is well worth quoting for its relevance: “When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical” (Ellison 1972, 53-54).

Affinities between Jewish and Irish literatures have inspired several scholarly inquiries, with Stephen Watt’s book “Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious (2015) as a significant achievement among them. In its “Introduction” Watt states that the Irish-Jewish unconscious underlies many American literary works, adding: “And for very good reason, given the histories of Irish and Jewish immigration to America that are intimately connected to this cultural production” (2015, 6). A more recent book in the field, Fine Meshwork by Dan O’Brien (2020) develops the unique method of analyzing not only the interface between individual works but also their relation to a literary friendship, the one between Edna O’Brien (1930) and Philip Roth (1933-2018). An Irish Catholic female novelist, living in London and a Jewish American male writer may appear as a strange pairing at first glance. However, what Dan O’Brien aims to demonstrate in the book is that being transnational authors both fight “against the ruthless Manichaeism of puritan conscience by emphasizing the hybridity of identity” whereas “the texts of these authors similarly reject national and literary purity through allusiveness that pay little heed to spatial or temporal boundaries” (2020, 8). Through his friendship with Edna O’Brien, whose activities included the introduction of the great Irish classics to the wider world, Roth got closer to both Synge and Yeats, writers with hybrid (Anglo-Irish) identities. In his later work Roth alludes to, cites and borrows from these Irish authors’ themes and characterizations, which he deploys as literary sources, intertexts and paratexts.

Roth’s 2009 novel, The Humbling interacts with Synge’s masterpiece, The Playboy in several ways. The central character of the novel is an ageing American actor called Simon Axler, who began his career early in life, getting the best possible dramatic roles and became idolized by audiences. One of his most memorable roles was playing Christy Mahon in Synge’s Playboy while Pegeen Mike Flaherty, the “strong-minded barmaid” (Roth, 2009, 14) Christy falls in love with was acted by Carol Stapleford, two months pregnant at that time. When the child, a daughter was born the parents named her Pegeen. Many years later, in the present of the novel, Carol, the actress mother confesses to her daughter that during the period they performed The Playboy she “had a crush on him [Axler],” a very handsome man, not unlike Pegeen cherishing a short-term, enthusiastic love for Christy in the play. Carol saw Axler as “a big forceful actor, a wonderful actor” (Roth 2009, 29) excelling in the role of Christy who, thanks to his Mayo village audience’s admiration for his art of storytelling becomes a fine actor too in spite of being ostracized by the community at the end. Apparently, the fusion and enmeshing of reality and theatricality provides an important layer of the novel.

The narrative of The Humbling begins with the sixty-five year-old Axler experiencing a profound crisis: he discovers that he feels too self-conscious on stage, moreover, is not able to continue his acting life. Therefore, he refuses a request to play another Irish character, James Tyrone, an ageing and no longer popular actor in O’Neill’s Long Days Journey into Night, obviously too close to his own present situation. He contemplates suicide, unsurprisingly in the theatrical mode, thinking of how frequently it enters into drama; the list of dramatic characters he thinks of in this regard contains Deirdre in Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows. After several months of psychological distress, the unlikely happens: Pegeen, the Staplefords’ daughter, now forty years old, appears on his doorstep, “determined that after seventeen years as a lesbian she wanted a man—this man, this actor, twenty-five years her senior and her family’s friend from decades back” (Roth 2009,16). Unwittingly, she fulfills her mother’s one-time wish when she and Axler become lovers, which has a curing effect on the man. However, after a time he tends to feel that he might lose Pegeen, recalling the amorous Synge’s fits of jealousy and concomitant self-torture in a rather precarious love relationship with an actress, Molly Allgood, sixteen years his junior, who was the first to act Pegeen in The Playboy on the Abbey Theatre’s stage.

The final chapter of the novel has the theatrical title “The Last Act,” in which Axler is more and more anxious about losing Pegeen. Hoping to save their relationship, once he even re-imagines himself in the role of the triumphant young Christy and while talking to her, he falls “into the Irish accent he hadn’t used since acting in The Playboy” (Roth 2009, 30). As on the stage, miming this accent (the brogue) serves him to feed the illusion that he can continue being Pegeen’s “only playboy,” not realizing that he deceives only himself. Next he creates a brand new scenario for the sake of Pegeen: they pick up a forlorn-looking drunk woman as a third partner they both can have sex with in front of each other. Through the lens of Axler the description of Pegeen’s lesbian love-making wearing a dildo on her body is highly theatrical, reminding the man of a primitive ritual in which she looks like “a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal” (Roth 2009, 36). Introducing Axler’s turn in the sex party the narrator quotes him, “‘Three children got together,’ he said, ‘and decided to put on a play,’ whereupon his performance began” (Roth 2009, 36). To invent yet another method to achieve keeping Pegeen as his lover, he takes the role of a dramatist and imagines a conversation between the two of them about having a child together. He feels he is “in the midst of a performance as good as any he had ever given” (Roth 2009, 38) and this fantasy becomes so real to him that he believes he now would be able to play James Tyrone in the Guthrie Theatre whose invitation he declined earlier.

However, the show staged in Axler’s mind clashes with reality and has an unexpected ending: Pegeen decides to break with him and move on, to which he reacts by using pathetic verbal and kinetic gestures like a bad actor in a mediocre play. Dan O’Brien’s view is that similarly to The Playboy, “Roth’s novel toys with traditional gender roles” (2020, 45), placing the respective male characters under female control. Combined with this, the unique theatricality and performativity of the play have also left their mark on the novel. In Synge’s drama it is Christy who leaves the girl, confident that he is now an independent artist as a storyteller and a “master of all fights” (Synge 1968, 173), thanks to the boosting of Pegeen and the community. Pegeen remains on stage among the petty-minded Mayo people and, realizing that she is back where she ever was, starts a performance of keening, a wild lament for losing “the only playboy of the western world” (Synge 1968, 173). In the novel Axler remains alone, and “it occurred to him to pretend that he was committing suicide in a play. … To succeed one last time to make the imagined real he would have to pretend that the attic was a theater and that he was Konstantin Gavrilovich Treplev in the concluding scene of The Seagull” (Roth 2009, 44). Paradoxically, being abandoned by Pegeen helps him to become a successful actor again, although at the cost of his life. Beside his body he leaves a note, saying: “The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself” (Roth 2009, 44). The differences between the central male characters’ fate in Synge’s and Roth’s works can be approached from the angle of the (not naively) hopeful spirit of a decolonizing culture versus the empty performativity and self-loss in postmodern literature.

Another book by Roth bears the title The Dying Animal, which borrows from lines in the third section of Yeats’s poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / it knows not what it is;” (1965, 217-18). The poem was first published in Yeats’s 1928 volume, The Tower. At that time Yeats was already in his sixties and definitely concerned with ageing and the weakening of his own masculinity. In the 1930s he experienced a fervent revival of his sexuality and had extra-marital affairs, which influenced the themes and imagery of his later poems (see Brown 2001, 346-47). Comparably, in Roth’s The Dying Animal the main character is a professor of literature almost seventy, a great lover of classical music, and the novel focuses on his sexual relationships especially the one with and ex-student of his, a young woman in her twenties. The relationship terminates after a while and the man has to realize that his bodily ageing is inevitable, he has lost attractiveness. In his despair he recalls the Irish poet’s words: “Isn’t that Yeats? ‘Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is.’ Yes. ‘Caught in that sensual music,’ and so on” (Roth 2001, 102). He discontinues the line he quotes from the first section of the poem, which conveys the idea that the young caught in the “sensual music” of life neglect “Monuments of unageing intellect” (Yeats 1965, 217). Thus the professor manages to avoid meditating on comparisons evoked by the poem and the truncated Yeatsian intertext does not introduce a more serious kind of self-confrontation on his part.

Some other pieces of American fiction from the post-World War II period onwards also use quotations from Yeats as their title. The title is a kind of paratext, of which Gérard Genette says that it “performs various functions” guiding and assisting the reader “to establish the text’s intentions: how it should be read, how it should not be read” (qtd. in Allen 2000, 101). No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (2006) borrows its title from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” like Roth’s The Dying Animal, in fact from the very first line of the poem, but there is no more direct allusion to Yeats and his poem in the text. However, the theme of the novel is foreshadowed by the title, suggesting that the setting of the plot, the drug-dealing world on the border of Texas and Mexico is one of violence where men rarely reach old age. Gabriella Vöő’s analysis of No Country for Old Men discusses the role of the Yeatsian quotation in the title and finds that it might inspire an intertextual network in the mind of the reader to broaden the scope of interpretation. For Vöő the last line of “Sailing to Byzantium,” about the poet-bird’s intention to sing “Of what is past, or passing, or to come” (2016, 218), can be read as a summing up of the aesthetic and epistemological concerns of No Country for Old Men as well (2016, 120). Ambitiously, the critic opines that lines from another poem by Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1921) could also be quoted to highlight the atmosphere of the novel, as it depicts chaos and disorder, heralding the approach of an even more horrifying period in human history (Vöő 2016, 113).

The sinister closure of “The Second Coming” is as follows, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (Yeats, 1965, 211). Joan Didion (1934), author of fiction, essays and journalism chose the half-line “Slouching towards Bethlehem” from the poem to be the title of her 1968 collection of essays. Before Didion’s “Preface” the whole poem of Yeats is included as a paratextual key-note to the book in which, the author states, many pieces are concerned “with the general breakup, with things falling apart” (Didion 1968, 13). The long essay eponymously titled “Slouching towards Bethlehem” opens with paraphrasing one of the initial utterances of “The Second Coming”: “The center was not holding” (Didion 1968, 94). Further on Didion lists a variety of social and moral ills to offer a severe critique of her country, which she thinks is one of “bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled” (1968, 94). It is especially the young people’s aimless wandering and self-destroying way of life that Didion seems to worry about; her depiction of their world calls the atmosphere of the contemporary American film, Easy Rider (1969) to mind.

One of the great Anglo-Irish predecessors admired by Yeats, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) wrote his own epitaph in Latin, which Yeats translated into English and published in his 1933 collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Like Swift he also composed his own epitaph, naming in it his would-be burial place and determining the ways in which people should think about him after his death. The lines in the closing section of his last poem, “Under Ben Bulban” written in September 1938, the month when the decay of nature begins, run as follows:

"Under Ben Bulban’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
…
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
   Cast a cold eye
On life, and death.
Horseman, pass by!"
(Yeats 1965, 401)

This bold confrontation of the inevitable mortality inspired the novelist and short story writer Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) to title her short story collection Cast a Cold Eye (1950). The piece “The Old Men” in the book portrays a young man in hospital following an accident that has happened to him, who wonders how to meet an old man, Mr. Ciccone in a nearby ward as he imagines hearing the noises the other makes. His curiosity pushes him to meditate about old age and the strength to endure its weight on the individual:

"What was it, he asked himself, that sustained Mr. Ciccone and, for that matter, all the old lively mountebanks of the era―Yeats, Augustus John, Freud, Einstein, Churchill? Surely not belief in the self, since the self, as these old men knew, was a joke, a nothing, a point du depart. Mere virtuosity perhaps, and a growing closetful of stage effects―the paunch, the wrinkle, the limp; the jowl, the shank, the bald pate." (Mary McCarthy 1950, 142-43)

Through these ruminations the author allows the protagonist of the story to anticipate postmodern ideas about the fictionality of the self-enhanced by the image of “stage effects” which connotes the theatrical nature of identity. In the morning of his operation the young man wakes up feeling liberated and happy, ready to continue living “selfishly and inconsiderately like the expressive old men; the actual no longer drew him with its womanish terrors and mysteries, its sphinx-rebuff and invidia. ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death,’ he sang out, borrowing from old Yeats’s tombstone” (Mary McCarthy 1950, 147). Never able to meet Mr. Ciccone, his elderly double, on the same day the brave and elated young man dies under the anesthetic.

Yeats’s poetry was very personal, which partly explains why his work influenced certain American confessional poets. Among them John Berryman (1914-1972), Richard Gray claims, “began under the burden of alien influences, particularly Yeats and Auden.” Quoting the poet Gray continues: “‘Yeats … saved me from the then crushing influence of … Pound and … Eliot,’ he added, ‘but he could not teach me to sound like myself’” (2004, 591). The poem “Olympus” by Berryman suggests that his veneration for R.P. Blackmur (1904-1965), poet and eminent Yeats-scholar in America at that time was inseparable from his love of Yeats:

"I wrote & printed an essay on Yeats’s plays
re-deploying all of Blackmur’s key terms
& even his sentence structure wherever I could.
When he answered by hand from Boston my nervous invitation

to come & be honored at our annual Poetry Reading,
it must have been ten minutes before I could open the envelope."
(1977, 401)

In his study of Yeats and American poets, Terence Diggory claims that “Berryman produced variations on Yeatsian themes throughout his career” and later adds: “One form in which Yeats’s expertise had a special attraction for Berryman was the song, or, as Yeats would have said, ‘Words for Music Perhaps’” (2014, 204-05). Berryman’s Dream Songs (1969) containing a series of poems is a notable example of this kind of attraction. Here he constructs a central figure called Henry, comparably with the Irish poet’s use of such figures, whose irregular recurrence and evasiveness have dazzled critics searching for some unity in the series. Each of the “dream songs” numbers eighteen lines and their unchanging six-line stanza structure might remind the reader of the dialectic antinomies between strictness of form and leaps of thought and emotion in Yeats’s later poetry.

Finally, a living poet, Susan Howe (1937) invites commentary on her relation to both Yeats and American avant-garde poetry. Midnight (2003), a unique collection of poetry, prose, copies of photos and engravings contains autobiographical details in which she presents her family-based acquaintance with Yeats. Howe’s mother was an Irish writer and critic, Mary Manning, (1905-1999) nowadays mostly remembered for her plays and work with the Gate Theatre of Dublin. From 1935 she lived in Boston, married to a professor of law. The poet gives tribute to her mother in Midnight, providing instances of how she introduced her daughter to the poetry of Yeats, the paintings of Jack B. Yeats and Irish culture in general:

"my mother brought me up on Yeats as if he were Mother Goose. Even before I could read, “Down by the Salley Gardens” was a lullaby, and a framed broadside “He wishes for the cloths of Heaven” printed at the Cuala Press hung over my bed. I hope her homesickness, leaving Dublin for Boston in 1935 … was partially assuaged by the Yeats brothers. She hung Jack’s illustrations and prints on the walls of any house or apartment we moved to as if they were windows. They marked another sequestered “self” where she would go home to her thought. She clung to Williams’ words by speaking them aloud. So there were always three dimensions, visual, textual, and auditory." (Howe 2003, 74-75)

Juxtaposing these autobiographical memories with pieces of her avant-garde poetry in the same volume supports Enikő Bollobás’s opinion that the past, obviously her own past too, was important for the poet because of its force in shaping the present (2021, 222). Bollobás considers Midnight as a “complex elegy written after Mary Manning’s death,” in which the Yeats quotations and other illustrations “enter into an actual physical dialogue with each other in what Howe calls the ‘relational space’ of the text” and a relational space comes about between mother and daughter too (2021, 239-240). Yeats, however, did not influence Howe’s poetry directly, which can be connected to the Pound-Olson tradition of American poetry while it also departs from it (Bollobás 2021, 222).

To conclude, Cleary can be quoted again, whose book Modernism, Empire, World Literature (2021) argues that in the first half of the last century decisive transformations were taking place in the “world literary system,” a term he borrowed from Pascale Casanova, re-energizing its meaning at the same time. He posits that what had been “[T]wo minor Anglophone peripheral literatures,” the American and the Irish, successfully challenged “English metropolitan dominance” in this cultural field (Cleary 2021, 13). The scrutiny of intertextual relations, interfaces, affinities and resonances between modern Irish and American literary texts may lead the scholar to the recognition of shared or contested elements which have their role, even though sometimes a minor one, in sustaining the powerful transnational expressiveness of these two literatures.

 

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