William Carleton's early and significant influence on William Butler Yeats was outlined yesterday by Prof Roy Foster on the opening day of the sixth annual summer school in honour of the Co Tyrone writer.
The summer school is being held all this week in the elegant 17th-century Corick House, now converted into a hotel, in Carleton's native Clogher Valley. Carleton himself, however, was born a peasant, and is remembered for his detailed accounts of peasant life in his time (1794-1869). One of his best-known works is Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry.
Summer school director Robin Marsh said its aim was "to ensure that William Carleton is recognised as the truly great writer that he is", and not the "local storyteller" which is how he is seen by some people.
Historian and Yeats biographer Roy Foster, who is currently Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford, gave yesterday's keynote address, titled "Square Built Power: Yeats, Carleton and the Irish 19th Century". He outlined how Yeats, at the age of 24, discovered Carleton through a crash-course in early 19th-century Irish fiction, admiring what he called Carleton's "square built power" and "fiery shorthand". This admiration, according to Prof Foster, was associated with his apprenticeship to Irish nationalism and his repudiation of his own unionist background.
Yeats published a collection of Carleton's stories, stressing his importance as a social historian of pre-Famine Ireland. Prof Foster said Carleton's conversion to Protestantism and his anti-clerical early work proved to be "a difficult issue" for Yeats. However, Yeats maintained that Carleton remained "Catholic at heart" and therefore authentic, Prof Foster told an audience that included both the Catholic and Church of Ireland bishops of Clogher, Dr Joseph Duffy and the Right Rev Brian Hannon.
He said Yeats would later discover, like Carleton, that "your background and what makes you, survives repudiation and returns to claim you in the end". From the 1890s onwards, Yeats lost much of his interest in Carleton, but Prof Foster argued that "themes and echoes in his poetry and fiction owe a good deal to his early readings" of Carleton stories. Yeats would also later celebrate in J.M. Synge the qualities he had seen in Carleton, which included "his readiness to accept the brutalities as well as the subtleties of Irish life".
Prof Foster said, Yeats used a very Carletonian concept in arguing for Home Rule as a bulwark against Catholic and Protestant bigotry by saying it would "educate Catholics mentally and Protestants emotionally".
Despite Yeats's claim to have forgotten him, his early immersion in Carleton "helped condition his didactic approach to Irish intolerance as well as his creative imagination". He added: "Perhaps he remembered more about Carleton than he knew, to his profit and to ours."
The school's theme this year is "Poor Scholar Revisited", to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Poor Scholar, a study of Carleton by Benedict Kiely. The book has just been reissued by Wolfhound Press and will be launched by Kiely at the school today. Later today, the poet John Montague will discuss "The Problems of the Irish Composer". Tomorrow local historian Jack Johnston will lead a tour of Carleton country. Speakers during the rest of the week include Patricia Craig, Dr Ivan Herbison and Owen Dudley Edwards, honorary director of the summer school. Poets James Simmons and Ciaran Carson are also taking part. Visual artists exhibiting in Corick House include Anne-Marie McCaughey, Sam Craig and Colin Gibson.
For further information about the William Carleton Summer School which runs until Friday, tel: 080 16625 48216.
