FROM THE ARCHIVES:WB Yeats won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and
The Irish Timeswas first to bring the news to him and dispatched Bertie Smyllie, apparently by tram, to the Yeats home in Rathfarnham for this quick interview.
– JOE JOYCE
A TELEPHONE message from the Irish TimesOffice was the first intimation which Mr. Yeats received of the high tribute which had been paid to his work. He had known nothing whatever about it, and was not even aware of the value of the prize.
“If it is a small one,” he said to Mrs. Yeats, “we will spend it and be rich ; if it is a large one we will invest it and be substantial.”
In the course of an interview with our representative, Mr. Yeats said that he assumed that the Nobel Committee had chosen him principally on account of his work in the Irish drama.
He had founded the Abbey Theatre, which gave Synge and Lady Gregory to the world, and he felt that the prize had been awarded rather to the Anglo-Irish literary movement than to himself.
This led him to speculate on the future of the Irish literary movement, and he developed some very interesting ideas. The romantic school, of which he himself was at once the prophet and master, he believes to be passing.
“What would replace it?” “Probably the psychologists,” said Mr. Yeats.
Of the new school, he thought that Mr. Lennox Robinson was the precursor. “Crabbed Youth and Age” showed the invasion of psychology into romanticism and he believed that the political change from striving to achievement would result in the eclipse of the dreamer, and the emergence of a new school of playwrights, more or less on the model of Ibsen in his “Dolls House” period.
“The difference,” said Mr. Yeats, “between the old and the new is the difference between Dr. Douglas Hyde and Mr. Kevin O’Higgins. The making of good citizens is the aim of to-day.”
Amongst the heralds of the new school he also mentioned Mr. James Joyce. “I am not a judge of the novel form,” he said, “but in Joyce’s work there is an intensity which is the essential of a great art. Even in a bad writer, or in a bad painter,” he continued, “one always can detect the signs of something new. Joyce is a very great writer, and something is there striving to be born.”
At all times Mr. Yeats is a delightful talker, but he is most delightful when talking about his lyrics. He refused to admit that they had been responsible for his election to the Nobel Prize, but did not deny that they really were his life’s work. Irish folk, he confessed, “is the only thing about which I ever shall care very deeply.”
One could have spoken for hours with Mr. Yeats, but a poet who is at once a Nobel Prize-winner and a Senator, albeit the most courteous and obliging of men, has many claims upon his time, and, besides, “last trams” have a cynical disregard for European fame.
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