Yeats was the greatest poet-critic since Coleridge, Prof Declan Kiberd told students at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo yesterday.
Speaking on "Yeats and Criticism", he said that when the poet set about founding a national literature he made it very clear that the gathering of an "interpretative community" was an intrinsic part of that process. His criticism was part of this task.
"Much of Yeats's criticism is his attempt to coach that gathered audience in the protocols of a true reading. The mob would only be bonded into a people when their lyric effusions were accompanied by acts of self-explanation and self-analysis.
"Moreover, his works, filled with the half-said thing, yearn for completion in the act of being read."
This view of art is found most often in post-colonial writing, he said. "Style is the means by which a W.B. Yeats or an Alice Walker dramatises a freed consciousness, to which members of their community can aspire."
Today it was possible to read many of the major critical essays by Yeats in the first decade of the 20th century as founding documents in the movement for cultural decolonisation, he said.
"He supported Douglas Hyde's campaign for the recognition of Irish as a secondary school subject by the Board of Education and as a fit subject for matriculation into the universities. But he went even further, arguing that Hiberno-English - the dialect spoken by country people who still thought in Irish while using English words - should be given official recognition.
"Had this been done, it would have anticipated by over six decades the curricular ratification of Afro-American dialects on American campuses: but the people's minds were so colonised that they felt ashamed of the emerging `lingo' rather than proud of its expressive subtlety."
Some of Yeats's detractors felt that the fact that the poet supplied the light by which his writings might be read afforded him too much latitude in dictating the conditions of his own reception, he said.
But it remained true that often the best way of reading one poem by Yeats is to go onto another one.
"For, though Yeats has properly called forth some of the finest critics to study poetry in the last century, not one of them has produced a reading of his work which is better than his own."
Much of Yeats's critical writings were written as journalism, along with that of other writers of the revival period, such as Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Thomas MacDonagh and others, he said. Yet most of this writing, which marked the formation of the nation, is now out of print.
Prof Kiberd said the Irish Manuscripts Commission should consider republishing the journalistic writings of these writers of the revival.
Dr Sinead Garrigan-Mattar, of Pembroke College, Cambridge, gave a lecture yesterday on "Yeats and Primitivism".
The school continues until the end of next week, when students will hear lectures from, among others, Prof Lucy McDiarmid from Villanova and Dr Tom Paulin from Oxford.
Lectures are open to the public and the school can be contacted at 071-47693.
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