W.B. Yeats' Folklore Connected to European Thought

Irish Studies Review
ISSN: 0967-0882 (Print) 1469-9303 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cisr20
‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats, J.G. Herder and the

imperfection of tradition
Barry Sheils
To cite this article: Barry Sheils (2012) ‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats, J.G. Herder and the
imperfection of tradition, Irish Studies Review, 20:3, 299-321, DOI: 10.1080/09670882.2012.699699
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Irish Studies Review
Vol. 20, No. 3, August 2012, 299–321
‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats, J.G. Herder and the

imperfection of tradition
Barry Sheils*
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, UK

In this article I connect Revivalist politics in nineteenth-century Ireland to
Enlightenment epistemology by exploring how the ideal of the Irish – or Celtic –
folk tradition is embroiled in the problematic of theoretical modernity. I dispute
Seamus Deane’s ideological characterisation of the Irish tradition, emerging from his
encounters with the work of Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold, and propose an
alternative characterisation using Johann Gottfried Herder’s theories of the Volk and
the origin of language. I show how, at a crucial point in European history, the folk
tradition modelled a view of cognition and modernity, which stood apart from analytic
rationalism and based itself upon a positive evaluation of the obscurity of sensation.
Finally, I read this literary-aesthetic model of what Herder called ‘dark’ cognition into
Yeats’s early folkloric works of the 1890s, especially The Celtic Twilight; and I make
the argument that this often-neglected text does not represent a degeneration of
folkloric integrity into Celtic mysticism but a comedic trait of folk modernity.
Keywords: Yeats; Herder; folklore; Celticism; the Irish Revival; Seamus Deane
It is fair to say that there has been a general and long-held critical suspicion of W.B.
Yeats’s ideological interest in the Irish peasant tradition. Although occasionally such
reservations have been taken as indicative of a fundamental problem with his political and
poetic hardwiring, more ordinarily they have been allowed to stand quite innocuously
within the context of his cultural achievement.1 The following 1979 evaluation from the
critic George Watson strikes a familiar note:
[Yeats] does not consider [the Irish peasant] in social or political terms, but as a romantic
phenomenon. Nevertheless, the image he creates in his work of a people dignified by an easy
commerce with mythology and folklore alive yet reaching back into antiquity was of powerful
national appeal; it gratified the Irish wish to believe that the successful neighbour nation was
soulless, and that Ireland herself retained in spite, or because, of her history of defeat, a moral
and spiritual superiority.2
This is not really intended to investigate the motives, practices or diverse effects of
collecting folklore; rather, it makes do with the simple felicity of pointing out that the
flipside of national gratification, for anyone who cares to think about the conditions which
make the nation possible or how the nation’s imaginary has been finessed, is ideological
accusation: yes, Yeats’s folklore contributes to a national mythology but it also neglects
the social and political conditions of the Irish peasant. This whisper of ideological bad
faith has been amplified in various ways: Yeats’s folk sensibility is a legacy of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century Celticism which promulgated standard ideas about the Celtic
*Email: sheilsbarry@hotmail.com
ISSN 0967-0882 print/ISSN 1469-9303 online

q 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2012.699699
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300 B. Sheils
character and then progressively racialised those ideas by projecting them onto the Irish
people; or, it is exemplary of the vampirism of an aristocratic, or pseudo-aristocratic,
Anglo-Irish class. Many of us who are familiar with Yeats’s claim that he and Lady
Gregory sought not the reality of the peasant but of the ‘peasant’s imagination’ are equally
familiar with the accusation that the real peasant has been summarily overlooked by the
poet, conveniently and problematically metaphorised into a form of poetic nutrition.3
In this article I would like to suggest that this now rather homely critique of what we
call Yeats’s ‘idealism’, though useful for interrogating the assumptions of his nineteenth-
century political standpoint, is limited when it comes to assessing the values which stand
behind his folklore. I want to reassess Yeats’s appreciation for the Irish peasant by exploring
how it emerges from a tradition of European romantic thought which places literature,
particularly poetry, at the heart of cultural politics and historical knowledge. Building upon
the work of Mary Thuente, Frank Kinahan and Sinead Garrigan Mattar, who have described
the context of folkloric and anthropological studies into which Yeats was manoeuvring
himself in the late nineteenth century, as well as Yug Mohit Chaudry, whose work has
proved invaluable for reading the influence of cultural politics on his folkloric writings,
I would like to suggest that Watson’s characterisation of Yeats’s folklore as ‘a romantic
phenomenon’ which gratifies a national wish can be read as an oversimplification both of
folkloric practice and of the ambivalent origins of romantic nationalism.4
Garrigan Mattar provides this useful riposte to a simple nationalist reading of Yeats
and folklore in the opening pages of her book Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival:
Rather than positing, as many critics do, that for each of these Revivalists [Yeats and Synge]
life began in Ireland, I want to show that their interest in primitive modes of life predated their
individual ‘conversions’ to nationalism: that it certainly predated their reading of comparative
anthropology, and that it was deeply connected to European traditions of thought – initially
romantic traditions, later scientific traditions.5
The Revivalist’s project of Irish cultural authenticity is framed, at its inception, by a more
general consideration of primitive nature and the ‘natural’ way to live. Further to this, the
‘European traditions of thought’ to which this consideration is connected embraces both
romantic and scientific traditions, suggesting how the practices of cultural revival are
bound to the Enlightenment questions of epistemology.6 It is my aim to deepen this
recognition by showing how the question of national folk traditions is fundamentally
connected to a form of modern reflection and judgement developed through philosophical
aesthetics. Using Johann Gottfried Herder’s theory of the Volk alongside his work on the
origins of language, I shall show how, at a crucial juncture in European intellectual history,
folk traditions modelled an alternative view of cognition and modernity, which stood
apart from analytic rationalism and was based upon a positive evaluation of obscurity.
It is indisputable that folklore was both historically germane to modern scientific and
encyclopaedic impulses and methodologically consolidated by science once natural
science had been valorised in the eighteenth century.7 Its emphasis upon collecting,
archiving, and categorising tell us this much. And yet, although folklore en-framed the
modern scientific conception of the world, and was itself unafraid to enlist the powerful
idea of natural authenticity – the idea of an ‘authentic’ tradition is a commonplace – it
also provided a means of preserving the ‘inauthentic’, the ‘forged’, the ‘invented’, and the
‘merely imagined’. As we shall see, it was through a corresponding theory of poetic
language, and its relation to ‘the folk’ and folkloric representation, that this kind of
preservation could be viewed as its own form of knowledge.
I shall proceed to read this literary-aesthetic model of what Herder called ‘dark
cognition’ into Yeats’s early folkloric works of the 1890s, especially The Celtic Twilight;
Irish Studies Review 301
and make the argument that this sometimes reviled text does not represent a degeneration
of folkloric authority into Celtic mysticism but a fundamental trait of folk modernity.8
If readers in the past have conferred on this text’s many dissonant registers a problem
to be explained, either by reference to Yeats’s eccentric belief system or the cultural
contradictions of Ireland in the 1890s, then I would like to offer a more general explanation,
connecting the comedy of its fragmentation to the theory of poetic imperfection implicit
in the Herderian conception of the Volk.
The folk, folklore and the paradoxes of Romanticism

The fact that Yeats’s affinity with Herderian traditions of thought has hardly been
acknowledged, even with respect to his folklore, is a consequence of two critical
conventions: the tendency to view Yeats as removed from the mainline of European
thought and a conviction that Yeats’s folklore is best read politically as an ideological
inheritance from Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold. In Celtic Revivals Seamus Deane
describes successive Celtic revivals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as ‘part of
the history of European Romanticism’ and yet, significantly, his argument remains
focused almost exclusively on the legacy of Burke and Arnold. Indeed, he argues that
Yeats’s development of a traditional aesthetic is only comprehensible in the light of
Burkean and Arnoldian assumptions about the Celt and the Anglo-Saxon.9 After observing
a sectarian division emerging from the tradition of Celticism, between those for whom
a more specifically Gaelic revival at the beginning of the twentieth century constituted a
grand narrative of continuity – the Irish Catholics – and those for whom such political
specificity constituted an historical betrayal – the Anglo-Irish protestants – Deane
suggests that Yeats’s Celticism ends up as a form of Anglo-Irish disgruntlement powered
by his alienation from an Irish tradition he had once imaginatively sustained. This in turn
leads the poet to chauvinistically overwrite the complex reality of modern Ireland.10
Deane broadens this argument in the lectures which make up Strange Country.11 Once
again he locates the peculiarity of Ireland within the Europe-wide discourse of ‘the Celt’
and Celticism, but here contends, more powerfully, that the modern invention of Irish
tradition emerged from a reactionary sentiment, especially that propounded by Burke in
the wake of the French Revolution. He describes how the traditional continuity of the Irish
nation was an idea adopted and tutored by Burke in order to recall the commercial culture
of modern England to her proper self against the threat of modern revolution embodied by
the French Republic. The projected national character of Ireland was, in this view, little
more than a means of finessing the philistine tendencies of England. And it was fated to
become, through the political Act of Union in 1801, a cultural guarantor of Britishness:
a model of modern economic statehood which could ideologically deny the modern –
French Republican – theory of the state through the strategic mobilisation of nostalgia. To
live under the sign of Burke’s Celticism, and in particular its inflection as the ‘folklorish’
tradition, was to live with a theoretical deficit. Here is Deane on Burke’s idea of tradition:
It is the aesthetic of the actual – an aesthetic which refuses the inclusion of distance and
impartiality or disinterestedness as integral to its structure. And that aesthetic is conjoined with its
political counterpart, the attribution to a community of a psychology that celebrates the actual,
that remains immersed in the local, the folklorish – or, more importantly, refuses the theoretical.12
This results in a central irony for Deane, namely that Burke’s tradition, his idea of
traditional continuity, relies upon a central absence or loss of tradition, and therefore
has nostalgia inscribed at its core. The life of tradition relies upon its own obituaries.
By implication, as a proponent of the Irish tradition – which is always, surreptitiously,
302 B. Sheils
an Anglo-Irish tradition – Yeats follows in the footsteps of Burke, as well as of other

influential Celticists such as the Scottish poet James Macpherson whose Ossianic poems in
the 1760s promoted folkloric images of national particularity at a time when the Act of
Union between Scotland and England was an accomplished fact. Indeed, Macpherson’s
poems provide a very useful co-ordinate here, since once they were ‘exposed’ as being
invented, or synthesised from a number of anachronistic sources, rather than, as
Macpherson once claimed, translated from an original Gaelic manuscript, they were seen
to exemplify the ideology of mourning for a tradition that had never existed.13 And, it was
these same confected ‘epics’, namely the Scottish tradition that recorded the original
blemish of the Celtic imaginary, namely of inauthenticity.
I have précised Deane’s work here not only because it has been so influential in its own
right but also because it typifies to some degree the current orthodoxy on Celtic and/or
Irish Revivalist politics. While his attempts to understand the production and
representation of the category ‘Celt’, and to overturn naive or racial readings of Irish
cultural exceptionalism, should be welcomed, I suspect that his valuation of the
revolutionary state (and its theory) over the idea of national tradition underestimates the
aesthetic aspects of folk traditionalism. I believe this can be accounted for by his reading
of Burke, whose anti-revolutionary unionism is seen to underwrite more general
conceptions of national character and folklore. Therefore, I shall propose an alternative
heritage and turn instead to the thought of Herder, whose conception of the Volk and
Nationalcharakter might be seen to be both critical and theoretical. This is not to claim
that Yeats was directly influenced by Herder. It is only to remark that the broad European
traditions of folklore and Celticism which Yeats inherited owe as much, if not more, to
Herder as they do to Burke.14
Herder and the Volk

The idea of the Volk, designating for Herder the cohesive power or expressive genius of
every individual nation, had a Celtic aspect at its inception. When Herder published his
Volkslieder in 1774 it contained three translated fragments from Macpherson’s Ossianic
poems, a work which he had already recommended in the face of the scandal of their origin
to other luminaries on the German cultural scene, including Goethe. He was effusive in his
praise of Celtic Geist, writing of its savage lyricism, ‘Know then, that the more savage,
that is the more freedom loving a people is, the more savage, that is, alive, free, sensuous,
lyrically active its songs must be.’15 He even used Ossian as an example for Germany,
‘You believe that we Germans should also have many more such poems as I indicated
when speaking of Scottish romance – I not only believe it, but I know it.’16 ‘[A]live, free,
sensuous, lyrically active’ are all significant terms here, suggesting at once the picturesque
attributes of another more primitive culture than his own and the ethical values which
Herder would like his Kultur to emulate. Alongside the Celtic, it was the Hebraic character
which most impressed Herder and helped him define the characteristics for his exemplary
nation. In his essay ‘The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry’ he points to ‘language, Law, and folk
practice’ as being the primary reasons for the Hebrew nation’s strength.17 Clearly, that he
speaks of the Hebrew nation at all, despite the geographic dispersal of the Hebrew people,
points to the political and metaphysical flexibility of his conception of cultural identity.
Race is also a relatively insignificant idea for Herder; as we shall see, ‘national character’,
which he posits against the ‘mechanical contrivances’ of the modern state, is formed
through the activities of language, law-making and folk practice, rather than reliant upon
an enduring first principle.
There is no doubt that Herder was pitching his ideas of Kultur and Volk in the bright
light of the Enlightenment; no matter how he critiqued the claims of rationalism and
cosmopolitanism, or, speaking politically, eighteenth-century French expansionism, his
project for ‘making’ a culture reflected encyclopaedic and natural scientific methodologies.18
For example, when he writes that ‘the mythology of every people is an expression of the
particular mode in which they viewed nature’ he makes an implicit claim to understand nature
and the structure of ‘genius’ which is common to the huge variety of cultural expressions in the
world.19 Even as each nation is assured of its unique character, it is inevitably placed within
a larger anthropological narrative and understood according to both its geography and level
of historical development. Herder enacts this same ‘world-literature’ paradox by translating
folksongs from other cultures into the German language. How is the multifarious collection
Volkslieder possible – a collection which includes Spanish ballads, Italian folksongs as well
as English, German, Nordic and Scottish songs – without an admission on Herder’s behalf
that he has failed to capture the expression of any culture apart from his own? After all,
each foreign expression not only originates within a particular culture but also expresses
a particular understanding of nature which is alien to the German understanding.
But even by accepting that his translations constitute a ragtag of appropriations whose
representations are essentially alien to the perspective of any other culture, Herder has not
resolved the broader question of modern exploitation. The apparently innocent gesture of
affirming other cultures as ‘unknowable’ – the ‘savage’ Celt for example – still identifies
them as recognisable ideas to be manipulated. Folklore as it was formalised in the
nineteenth century is exemplary in this respect. Although its increasingly ‘scientific’ and
universalist approach to collecting folk artefacts seems in outright contradiction to
Herder’s valorisation of distinct Volk traditions, it is equally true that the objectification of
folk cultures is made easier once a particular culture’s life expression is deemed self-
sufficient and meant only for itself. Indeed, we might say that the nineteenth-century
folklorists deliberately cultivated the illusion that the folk were self-sufficient and entirely
unaffected by the gaze of the folklorist in order that they could get on with their job of
collecting and archiving folk ‘objects’. In this way, the essential, unknowable life of
Herder’s Volk traditions became the structural condition – the desired but inaccessible
‘thing-in-itself’ – for a universal, modern representation of the folk.
Hans Georg Gadamer describes this problem, whereby the folkloric impulse towards
historical relativism promotes a universalist perspective, as one of the paradoxes of
romanticism. Just as the practice of promoting particular cultures ends up availing of
Enlightenment techniques of collecting, archiving and classifying, so the apparent
rejection of scientific method in favour of emotional sympathy creates convenient forms
for future scientific projects.
The great achievements of romanticism – the revival of the past, the discovery of the voices of
the peoples in their songs, the collecting of fairy tales and legends, the cultivation of ancient
customs, the discovery of worldviews implicit in languages, the study of the ‘religion and
wisdom of India’ – all contributed to the rise of historical research, which was slowly, step by
step, transformed from intuitive revival into detached historical knowledge.20
Herder’s and Yeats’s ‘intuitive revivals’ are implicated in this process of turning other
cultures into a resource for the modern European subject. According to Gadamer, by
archiving these resources – exotic scenes, images of primitive life – justifying them,
and making them, at least from a formal perspective, understandable – though their
expressive content is always conjectured beyond the scientific realm – romanticism
results in a ‘radicalisation of the Enlightenment project’.21 This leads directly to the age
of historicism:
304 B. Sheils
Nineteenth-century historiography . . . is the last step in the liberation of the mind from the
trammels of dogma, the step to objective knowledge of the historical world, which stands on a
par with the knowledge of nature achieved by modern science.22
This returns us to Deane’s standard critique of Celticism and the Irish tradition, where he
understands the romantic myths of the past to support a reactionary ideology. Now that we
have followed how this anti-modern form of modernity – tradition – designated by
Gadamer as romanticism, prepares for rather than obstructs the growth of scientific
knowledge, we can ask a further question of Deane’s characterisation of modern theory.
‘Theory’, for Deane, as the commitment to reflecting on society at a productive distance
from customary life, is undermined by the Irish folk tradition’s commitment to
particularity and what he terms ‘the aesthetic of the actual’. Yet if we follow Gadamer’s
thought, that the theoretical conception of the world would seem to depend on forms of
emotional identification – it is this which accounts for scientific historiography emerging
from romanticism – then we enter a more difficult terrain. Although the analytic impulse
of modern science works to distinguish authentic from inauthentic materials – the
‘historically accurate’ from the ‘imaginatively useful’ as Deane puts it in Celtic Revivals –
it is nonetheless dependent on these materials being discovered, invented and synthesised
in the first place, so they exist to be given over for analysis. Do we suggest, in light of this
persistent question of origin, that theory supports the analytic method of natural science
and nineteenth-century historiography against the romantic myths of national traditions,
or do we characterise theory more broadly as that which also grounds the process of
synthesis and literary invention manifest in these traditions? In other words, might we find,
pace Deane, through the terms of the folk tradition the beginnings of a literary and
linguistic conception of theory?23
I suggest that we find in Herder’s writing seminal acts of resistance to the reduction
of theory and science to the analytic method. It follows from this that the characterisation
of Herder as an unwitting contributor to the method of scientific historicism is only
partial. By contending that ‘making’, ‘expressing’ and ‘synthesising’ are forms of human
knowledge every bit as important as those objects of analysis which had so dominated
the advance of the natural sciences in the eighteenth century, Herder infers that national
folk traditions formed out of these acts are not to be seen as simple objects offered for
analysis.24 This is what allows him to endorse the ‘alive, free, sensuous, lyrically active’
qualities of Macpherson’s Ossianic fragments, even once their historical authenticity
has been called into question by scientific antiquarianism. Macpherson’s work should
be determined according to judgement of its expressive quality as well as according to
historical scholarship.
This judgement is itself a species of Enlightenment thought, of course; but even if the
claim to be able to judge the effect of Macpherson’s language is universalising, it allows
the origin of this language to remain obscured: an obscurity which the analytic method
would not allow. Herder’s remarks on this crucial difference can be found in an early work
‘Essay on Being’ (1764) where he describes the difference between the Newtonian
method – where natural phenomena are understood according to scientific laws – and the
experience of sensation. He develops the distinction, which emerged from Locke and
Baumgarten’s nascent ‘science of aesthetics’, between strict scientific logic and ‘sensate
cognition’, where the latter implies a knowledge produced by sensation different in kind
from that produced by analysis.
Since aesthetics in general is closely related to our bosom, since it deals with the subtlest
experiences of sensation, instead of with principles of reason, its coil is also more difficult to
unwind than that of other, more complex metaphysical concepts.25
Sensation here can be characterised paradoxically as both simple and difficult – it is not
such a ‘complex metaphysical concept’ yet ‘its coil is also difficult to unwind’ – because it
presents two different inclinations: one intent on tracing an effect to its objective cause or
origin; the other determined to capture the power of the effect. In fact, there are two
potential objects here, an object of analysis and a felt object, where knowledge of the latter
depends on keeping its origins obscure. If in order to know a sensation one must be subject
to, or must live with, its power, then an attempt to clarify the sensation according to its
causes may work out as an affront to true knowledge. Herder was sympathetic to this
paradoxical perspective, and sought to derive knowledge from expressive sensation while
insisting on a level of original obscurity. He termed this kind of knowledge, ‘sensate’ or
‘dark’ cognition.26
The simplicity of the folk – often characterised as naivety or primitiveness – retains
the same paradoxical difficulty which belongs to sensation. The scientific explanation of
the folk according to a universal, anthropological law of folk origins, while it makes sense
as a political or historical narrative, forecloses a certain sensate experience of folk life. The
further danger inherent in this foreclosure is the reduction of all folk traditions to an
identical set of conditions. Herder makes the theoretical link between his interest in the
Volk and ‘dark’ or ‘sensate’ cognition in his ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’.
Herder and the imperfection of language

Throughout ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, which prompts the question of origin in its
most general form, Herder argues against both the ‘divine origin of language’ and the view
that language is what distinguishes man (and man’s soul) from animals, preferring the idea
that ‘[w]hile still an animal, man already has language’.27 This argument from the
physicality of language – its ‘nervous structure’ – reminds us of Herder’s profanity,
equally in evidence in his writing on Hebraic folklore when he insists that the sacred book
of the bible should be viewed as a piece of Hebraic folk literature.28 But, interestingly, his
is a profanity pitched against the piety of a strand of Enlightenment enquiry, as well as of
the Christian Church.
One of the upholders of the divine origin of language discerns and admires divine order in the
fact that all the sounds of all the languages known to us can be reduced to some twenty odd
letters. Unfortunately the fact is wrong, and the conclusion still wronger. There is no language
whose living tones can be totally reduced to letters, let alone to twenty.29
Herder shows how the theological assumption that language is of divine origin consorts
with an analytic reduction of language to a set of fundamental components – i.e. letters.
The implication is that man’s privileged link with God is based upon rational order which
is exhibited by the grammar of language. In other words, only in so far as language derives
from reason is it of divine origin. Herder contests this view by insisting that although
language and reason must belong equally to man’s nature, they cannot be simplified by
reference to some transcendent origin.30 He complains that contemporary discourse on the
subject leads to a false opposition: ‘Down one way, language appears to be so superhuman
that God had to invent it; down the other, it is so inhuman that every animal could invent it
if it were but to take the trouble.’31 The mistake of other writers, according to Herder, is
that in their rush to identify the origin of language outside of man’s use of it they depend
upon the mechanism of perfect rationality, to such an extent that in the end it is immaterial
whether language’s origin is with God or animal nature. Ultimately it suffices to say that
language is logical; that it is guaranteed a perfect regularity either by the moral order of
God or the mechanical order of the natural universe.
306 B. Sheils
Herder’s intervention here faces two ways. In one direction he argues that, although
man possesses an animal nature and possesses language as a sensate animal it is a mistake
to say that he derives his language from this nature. In fact, language is what saves man
from the logic of natural derivation. While other animals operate perfectly according to
their nature, it is the basis of man’s freedom that he cannot:
There is no single work of man in which his actions are not improvable, but he enjoys the
freedom of exercise in many things and hence the freedom of improving himself forever.
A thought, any thought, is not a direct work of nature, and for that very reason it can be a work
of his own . . . no longer an infallible machine in the hands of nature, he himself becomes
a purpose and an objective of his efforts.32
What distinguishes man from other animals is his imperfection and this is manifested in
language. But, looking in the other direction, we should not expect Herder to provide a religious
account of man’s ‘impoverishment’. It is certainly not that the language of man is a poor copy
of the Word of God, for instance, but rather that language is essentially and humanely
imperfect – not only in its practice but in its conception – and any attempt at an analytic
reduction of language, to a logic of divinity or natural origin, misses this essence.
Herder’s distinctive characterisations of language consolidate this point. After once and
for all dispelling the divine grammar hypothesis he turns his attention to the primacy of sound
in language. In the course of this excursus he corrects Diderot’s famous presumption that
people born blind are less receptive to life and suffering than those with normal vision,
arguing that it is keen hearing which most binds man to the world and to nature.33 He redeems
the obscurity of blindness in the midst of a cult of sight – the Enlightenment – at the same
time suggesting a view of language which prefers a primitive aurality over the characteristics
of visual depiction – characteristics which link the oracular function to the idea of objective
representations of things in words. Later on in the essay, when describing how a human
vocabulary is synthesised ‘from the sounds of the world’, he links the apprehension of
this ‘sounding’ to the very structure of language: things speak and people hear, and therefore:
from the verbs it was that the nouns grew and not from the nouns the verbs. The child names
the sheep, not as a sheep, but as a bleating creature, and hence makes of the interjection a verb.
In the gradual progress of human sensuousness, this state of affairs is explicable; but not in the
logic of a higher spirit.34
Language doesn’t belong to ‘the higher spirit’ but to the sphere of ‘human sensuousness’,
and as such rejects the non-sensuous sense of sight which proposes objects that precede
acts and determines to count these objects’ properties rather than be affected by their
‘shaping’ or their ‘colouring’. For Herder, language privileges acts over things, because
language itself is an act – speaking, hearing – and not a thing. In the end it is left to poetry,
which is inextricably linked in Herder’s mind to the Volk, to reflect this active and
imperfect essence of language. Poetry testifies to the failure of analysis when applied to
language – the impossibility of identifying its origin – even at a time in the eighteenth
century when language has become the vehicle for analysis in other new scientific fields
of knowledge.
The central point I want to extract from Herder’s work here concerns how this
view of language alters our understanding of the folk tradition. It is not that each folk
tradition identifies itself according to an original language. This is a common political
and epistemological oversimplification, for it objectifies language as an authenticator of
tradition, consigning its essence to the past, and suggests that every ‘living’ folk tradition
derives itself logically, divinely and, above all, grammatically, from a single source. Rather,
following Herder, the essential similarity of the folk to language resides in its construction
of itself, act by act. The folk tradition, despite the most scrupulously grammatical
characterisations of it by nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklorists, shares with language
the peculiar quality of being essentially improvisatory and ungrammatical.35
This idea, that the folk tradition is essentially ungrammatical, is quite uninteresting,
however, if it simply means that we have presented a naive, unlettered object to those
scientists and anthropologists who have the grammar to scrutinise it. In that case, folk
illiteracy is a natural phenomenon which can be articulated perfectly. The power of
Herder’s conception is based upon imperfection; and the extent of Herder’s influence
demands that folk stupidities, illiteracies, even crystalline ‘folk wisdoms’ – so-called by
the urbane collector – are understood as acts to be performed. Which is to say, no folk
tradition is complete to itself but exists in relation to itself and its other – usually the
folklorist or anthropologist. This imperfect relation accounts for a tradition of the verb, of
call and response, over the noun.
Yeats and the language of folklore

Given the influence of ideological readings of Yeats’s folklore, it seems a necessary
corrective to insist that Yeats had an obligation to folkloric ‘inauthenticity’ – the Celtic
blemish – well beyond his predilection for Burkean or Arnoldian politics, due to the poetic
exhortation to synthesise an active culture and act out a cultural role. We are able to follow
how in the 1890s, besides negotiating the politics of the Gaelic Revival and the Irish
Ireland movement on one hand, and late Victorian patronage on the other, he was working
towards an understanding of the comedy of cultural interaction, where culture is always,
indeed essentially, imperfect. In doing so, he was also working back to the ‘dark’ origin of
folklore, discernible in Herder’s theory of poetic language.
By the time it came to publishing The Celtic Twilight in 1893 Yeats was familiar with
a wide range of the Irish materials available. As well as his 1888 anthology Fairy and Folk
Tales of the Irish Peasantry he had also edited two volumes of Irish stories, Stories from
Carleton in 1889 and Representative Irish Tales in 1891, and compiled another folk
anthology Irish Fairy Tales in 1892. The serious-mindedness of Yeats’s early approach is
evident in the introductory essay to the first of these collections, which begins with
a predictable point against the spirit of modern science.36 After enumerating some of the
beliefs of the Irish peasantry, fairies and ghosts in particular, he writes, ‘that now old and
much respected dogmatist, the spirit of the age, has in no manner made his voice heard
down there [the west of Ireland]’.37 We have already considered why this kind of
rhetorical identification with the ‘anti-modern’ peasant might be problematic; by setting
himself against the scientific folklorists, who conceive folk beliefs to be primitive errors,
and then re-characterising them as an ideal form of the good, he reflects rather than
subverts the dogma of ‘modernity’. The classification of fairy types and explanatory
footnotes which appear at the end of the volume designed to naturalise the reader to the
world of the Irish peasant prove this point, since they are entirely in keeping with the
dominant ‘spirit’ he claims to dispute.38
The modern reader of these early anthologies is always assumed to be someone who
requires guidance in unfamiliar territory. Consequently, there is a special concern for what
is representative. In Representative Irish Tales where this concern is manifest in the title,
Yeats makes a somewhat self-conscious attempt to engage with representativeness as
a political problem. Although introducing the tales as an example of ‘Ireland talking to
herself’39 – a truly optimistic statement considering the ragtag of authors included – 40 he
308 B. Sheils
goes on to distinguish the ‘true peasant’ from ‘the knave’ for the benefit, it seems, of
a vulnerable readership, uninitiated into ‘true’ Irish life:
The true peasant remained always in disfavour as ‘plotter’, ‘rebel’, or man in some way
unfaithful to his landlord. The knave type flourished till the decay of the gentry themselves,
and is now extant in the boatmen, guides, and mendicant hordes that gather round tourists
while they are careful to trouble at no time anyone belonging to the neighbourhood with their
century-old jokes. The tourist has read of the Irish peasant in the only novels of Irish life he
knows, those written by and for an alien gentry.41
Yeats often expurgated his introductions for journalistic publication.42 Even
unexpurgated, however, though apparently sincere in its attempt to confront the issue of
stage Irish caricature and politically charged by its labelling of an ‘alien gentry’, this
paragraph reads as self-defeating. Who seeks, after all, for authenticity in a peasant, except
a ridiculously high-minded tourist who wants to deny he is on vacation?
In his 1888 introduction Yeats distinguishes three different approaches to collecting
folklore and representing the folk in Ireland: Crofton Croker and Samuel Lover, ‘who
imagined the country as a humorist’s Arcadia’; Lady Wilde for whom ‘humour has given
away to pathos and tenderness’; and Douglas Hyde whose work is ‘neither humorous nor
mournful; it is simply life’.43 Hyde’s work is compared favourably both to the exotic
picturesque of Croker and Lover in which the fairy tales are a fantastical removal from
commonplace experience, and to the tragic anti-modern identifications in Lady Wilde’s
work. However, it would be naive to ignore the tenor of authenticity politics in the statement
‘it is simply life’. It imputes a representative accuracy to Hyde’s work and suggests it is to be
preferred because it rescues Irish folklore from the caricatured representations of
Victorianism. There is little doubt that Yeats’s editorial mind is making a strategic
intervention on Hyde’s behalf; yet if he wants to resolve issues of folkloric representation
according to a combination of Hyde’s linguistic and nationalistic objectivity, we might
wonder whether, as a consequence, he would excise the expressive freedom he wants to
privilege in the folk. This evaluation is fraught because it is in danger of proscribing the
freedom of literary representation per se. Reading through all of the early folk anthologies,
one is struck by the extravagant use of phonetically transcripted speech and non-standard –
‘Hiberno-English’ – syntax. This is found in Croker and Lover, but also in William Carleton
who was himself a ‘peasant’ from County Tyrone. It is an old question, worth asking again:
does this Hiberno-English mode reflect a superior verisimilitude or an inauthentic staginess?
Mattar reminds us that Yeats cut ‘the most literary passages’ from the authors he compiled,
but in the process failed to resolve the underlying questions of authenticity.44 The formative
difficulty here is that in trying to excise the literary exaggeration which Yeats reads as an
inflection of Victorian patronage of the Irish and instead to prescribe ‘simple’, so-called
‘realistic’ English, Yeats risks standardising and institutionalising the language of folkloric
representation, and going against the literary ‘origin’ of the folk.
Hyde is Yeats’s test case for this dilemma, since it is Hyde’s mastery of the Irish
language, and the emerging politics of the Gaelic League, which provokes it to the highest
degree. In 1890, Yeats writes in admiration of Hyde’s Gaelic authenticity: ‘[Hyde] is so
completely a Gael, alike in thought and literary idiom, that I do not think he could falsify
a folk-tale if he tried’.45 Five years later, however, in a review of Hyde’s The Story of
Gaelic Literature he writes in less complimentary terms:
[Hyde] is so anxious to convince his little groups of enthusiasts of the historical importance of
the early Irish writings, of the value to modern learning of the fragments of ancient custom
which are mixed up with their romance, that he occasionally seems to forget the noble
phantasy and passionate drama which is their crowning glory.46
While in 1890 Hyde’s Irish language skills grant him superior access to an Irish tradition
unavailable to Yeats, by 1895 these same linguistic talents may be inhibiting his
imaginative entry into any folk tradition; an authority which ‘could not falsify a folk tale’
has become problematic because, in a sense, it lacks the quality of falsification. It is
tempting to attribute Yeats’s apparent change of heart here to Hyde’s 1892 lecture ‘The
Necessity for De-anglicising Ireland’. Certainly, the character of Yeats’s nationalism, of
the school of the Fenian John O’Leary, was not aligned with Hyde’s radical de-anglicising
vision. Yet we know that as early as 1886, when both men were cutting their journalistic
teeth with the Dublin University Review, Hyde had rehearsed many of the same arguments
in an article entitled ‘A Plea for the Irish Language’.47 It is also on record that subsequent
to Hyde’s 1892 lecture, Yeats continued to lend public support to the Gaelic League.48 It
would seem mistaken, therefore, to view his critique of Hyde as a rift based upon his
rejection of the Irish language tout court. It is true that when he responded to Hyde’s
lecture in the United Ireland, he memorably compared ‘the Gaelic tongue’ to ‘the snows of
yesteryear’. It is less often remembered what the terms of his broader argument were.49 In
fact, Yeats was very careful to offer support to the language movement, even as he
qualified its aims: ‘Let us by all means prevent the decay of that tongue’ he wrote ‘and
preserve it always among us as a learned language to be a fountain of nationality in our
midst, but do not let us base upon it our hopes of nationhood.’50 If this is Yeats’s strategic
concession to a political constituency of Gaelic Leaguers who would have made up a
considerable portion of his readership, it is also the conclusion to a larger thought about
what constitutes ‘the continuity of the nation’s life [its tradition]’. The Irish national
tradition is not, avers Yeats, based upon the recovery of a single language but rather upon
‘translating or retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm
and style . . . ’.51 In other words, in order to invigorate the Irish tradition the idea of
linguistic origin must be carried over into the aesthetic realm of ‘indefinable’ quality.
Tellingly, Yeats’s principal model for this is America. By regarding the idiom of ‘Walt
Whitman, Thoreau, Bret Harte, and Cable, to name no more’ as exemplary of the national
‘quality’, he openly reflects on the paradoxical modernity of his folkloric endeavour, since
any such new-world tradition is conspicuous for its disconnection from a single origin –
most starkly from the idea of a native ‘American’ population, but, equally, this could be
from the idea of a native language. A tradition based upon the qualities of ‘translating or
retelling’ invariably mourns its lost origin yet remains in its expressive life
unauthenticated and uninhibited by the idea of original perfection. Yeats rearticulates
this point as a warning to Hyde and the Irish language revivalists; the attempt to redeem
the origin of a tradition, he suggests, is always in danger of contradicting that tradition’s
life.
Introducing The Celtic Twilight

The publication history of The Celtic Twilight (CT) reflects the deceptive simplicity of its
subject matter. In the late 1880s and early 1890s Yeats was accepting commissions from
both the Dublin-based United Ireland, a journal which suggested censorship as the only
solution to the problem of the caricature of Irish peasants on the British stage, and
the Scots Observer, a unionist journal which treated Irish cultural politics with extreme
condescension.52 In 1891 the United Ireland nominated Yeats to represent Ireland in
the Folklore Congress. In the same year the Scots Observer published an article ridiculing
the very idea of such a congress, leading with the sarcastic headline ‘Fairies in Congress’.53
It is surprising, then, to find it was the latter journal that first commissioned several of the
310 B. Sheils
folkloric pieces which would go on to appear in CT.54 ‘Scots and Irish Fairies’, ‘Village
Ghosts’, and ‘Columkille and Rosses’ are three of Yeats’s Scots Observer articles from
1889, which reappeared, though slightly altered, in his 1893 text, establishing a journalistic
heritage that ensured certain sections of CT had undertaken quite separate negotiations with
the perils of cultural cliché before being published in book form. This goes some way to
accounting for the text’s published unevenness. There are further reasons for this
unevenness, however, as we shall see, including the fact that there are several different
published editions which overwrite one another in sometimes contradictory ways. The 1902
edition of CT represents the most substantial alteration of the 1893 text, omitting one section
and adding another eighteen. Yeats credited Lady Gregory with helping him to incorporate
new Irish mythological materials as well as introduce a style of language (idiomatic
English) that came ‘closer to the life of the people’.55 It seems he was working under the sign
of this new closeness to the people when he decided to edit out what he then, in 1902,
considered an outmoded Celticist line from 1893, praising certain lines of poetry written by
an unnamed ‘friend’ – presumed to be George Russell (AE) – : ‘They, with their wild music
as of winds blowing in the reeds, seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and
of Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen’ (93, 17). Significantly, for the
terms of our reception of the book today,56 this line was re-inserted in subsequent editions
and accompanied by the following enigmatic footnote:
I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a part of all peoples who
preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of the world. I am not so preoccupied with the
mystery of race as I used to be but leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged.
We once believed them, and have, it may be, not grown wiser.57
The policy here ‘to leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged’ is at once an
assertion and an abdication of editorial authority. Although an apparently banal, even
superfluous, intervention, it is interesting how this kind of overlay is hardly out of place
within the medley of existing voices in CT, merely adding ‘Yeats the editor’ to the mix of
‘Yeats the narrator’ and other unnamed narrators, folk informants and ‘friends’. Indeed, as
a textual effect – excessive and anachronistic – it is in key with the text as a literary work
of folklore; the sense that the sentence can speak for itself, and yet needs to be spoken for,
captures quite felicitously the anthropological ironies with which the text is engaged.
These ironies are further underlined in the opening section entitled ‘This Book’ – does
CT ever attain the finished unity of a book? – in which the dilemmas of knowledge,
representation and textual unity are immediately conceded:
I have . . . written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except
by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined. I have, however, been at no
pains to separate my own beliefs from those of the peasantry, but have rather let my men and
women, dhouls and faeries, go their way unoffended and defended by any argument of mine.
(93, 1; 02, 1)
What, we may ask, differentiates the ‘commentary’, where Yeats has given himself the
unusual licence to add what he merely imagines, from the primary text which is
supposedly ‘accurate’ and ‘candid’? We would be hard pressed to find a dividing line in
a book that seems to place commentary at the heart of what it records. This much is
admitted in the next sentence where he assures us that he has not been at pains to separate
his beliefs from those of the peasantry. He describes ‘men and women, dhouls and faeries’
going on their way unoffended by his anthropological gaze, whilst, paradoxically, granting
this ontologically indeterminate group the rare privilege of belonging to him. The question
of authenticity is both posed and made ridiculous. As he puts in a 1902 addition: ‘I have
invented nothing but my comments and one or two deceitful sentences that may keep some
poor story-teller’s commerce with the devil and his angels, or the like, from being known
among his neighbours’ (02, 3). In other words, in order to protect the origin of his material,
there must be at least some misrepresentation.
In what is a more developed version of a passage which first appeared in his
introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Yeats continues in the
second section ‘A Teller of Tales’ with a description of his chief folk informant, ‘a little
bright-eyed old man’ called Paddy Flynn:
He was indeed always cheerful, though I thought I could see in his eyes (swift as the eyes
of a rabbit, when they peer out of their wrinkled holes) a melancholy which was well-nigh
a portion of their joy; the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all
animals. (93, 3 –4; 02, 4)
We are implicitly warned that we should not discount the personality of the teller in our
appreciation of the tale. The doubleness of the passage bears this out: although Paddy is
described as ‘always cheerful’, the narrator speculates that he can detect an instinctive
melancholy in his eyes. As the narrator idealises beyond the bounds of his encounter into
melancholy vision, he is forced to concede that he has but grasped ‘a portion’ of what
confronts him phenomenally: the more proximate, but also more original, form of joy. So,
even as Celticist assumptions are proposed they are ironically modulated. This establishes
a literary frame in which every interpretation or moment of folkloric abstraction is set
against the inscrutable cheerfulness – is it frivolity, is it mockery? – of the folk informant.
Paddy is a seductive rather than convenient presence in the text. When the narrator
asks him ‘had he ever seen the faeries’ Paddy replies with a question of his own: ‘Am
I not annoyed with them?’, at once evading the straight interrogation and elaborating on it
(93, 5; 02, 5). Whilst a strict ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have confirmed his status as a folk
believer, it would have fallen well short of involving his interlocutor in the attitude of
belief. As it stands, his response enlivens a question asked in the spirit of analysis and data
collection and inducts the narrator into the mode of conversation.
This first encounter sets the tone for the whole work where the narrator’s allegorical
interpretations and summations of seemingly extraneous details contribute to his
imaginative entry into the tradition. The modes of discursive authority vary in the text
from sociological statements about the superiority of the folk over modern society, ‘folk-
art is indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought because it refuses what is passing
and trivial’ (02, 232 –3), to anthropological exegesis: ‘I am not certain that he [the peasant]
distinguishes between the natural and supernatural very clearly’ (02, 102), to ‘romantic’
whimsy in which the peasant represents ‘the vast and vague extravagance of the Celtic
heart’ (93, 17). The book is divided, or fragmented, into short sections, or what Thuente
terms ‘essays’. She argues:
Although the removal of an interlocutor from tales Yeats used in Fairy and Folktales had
improved the sense of immediacy in those selections, the presence of Yeats’s personal voice in
The Celtic Twilight increases rather than decreases the immediacy of his materials. The
difference is that the selections in Fairy and Folktales were tales, whereas the selections in The
Celtic Twilight are personal essays.58
This paradox, whereby the mediation of personality creates an increased feeling of
immediacy, is due in part to the destabilising effect of the text which, by ceaselessly
breaking up the intention and summary point of each personal intervention, creates a kind of
dramatic pandemonium. Indeed, even the term ‘essay’ seems authoritarian in the context of
these often exiguous and apparently fruitless interventions. Certainly, the uneven breaks
312 B. Sheils
in the text destroy any sense of chronology and the narrator does not seem to develop any
overall understanding of the culture he surveys. If anything, his capacity to narrate his
anthropological story with distinction is infiltrated and implicitly undermined by the
fictional narratives he is supposed to be collecting. In ‘A Voice’, he takes time to set the
scene much as if he were beginning to tell a folk story, ‘one day I was walking over a bit of
rushy ground close to the Inchy wood’, only for his academic preoccupation, and the lack of
narrative eventuality to obtrude, reminding us of its status as meditation or memoir, ‘I had
been preoccupied with Aengus and Edain, and with Manannan, son of the sea’ (02, 115).
Although at times the narrator plays the role of an ‘honest’ ethnographer, accounting for his
sources when he presents Paddy Flynn, the woodcutter or the Mayo Woman, on other
occasions he unaccountably disappears from the text. Consequently, where there is little
reference to the inception of a tale or proverb, the reader has the distinct sense that it is
invented, or that its meaning is archly constructed by the ‘absent’ narrator who has been so
loquacious elsewhere. It is difficult to read ‘Aristotle and the Books’, for instance, without
seeing, clearly and pointedly, the controlling presence behind it, and how Yeats is using it to
allegorise the folkloric endeavour. A man, in order to know the secret of how bees ‘packed
comb’, created an artificial hive with a glass covering, ‘but when he went and put his eyes to
the glass, they had it all covered with wax so that it was as black as that pot; and he was as
blind as before’ (02, 112). There is an echo of Herder in this parable. For Herder, mankind,
who possess the imperfection of language, invariably lack the ‘artifactive capacities’ of
bees, whose powers of conception are confined to the construction of a honey cell.59 The
man who wants to know the secret of how bees pack comb is a surrogate for the folklorist
who wants to possess the secret of the folk, and who, in the infallible industry of the bees,
seeks his own infallible knowledge. His failure, then, is consequent upon the imperfections
of the folk who fail to satisfy his definitions.
If we can permit that CT possesses a super-plot, which loosely connects its multiple
sections, it is ironically picaresque. The narrator travels to a community, armed with an
investigative though poetical mind, determined to uncover the truth: ‘I then asked whether
she and her people were not dramatisations of our mood’. But there he is met by secrecy and
obscurity: ‘be careful she replied and do not seek to know too much’ (93, 87; 02, 94). Several
examples of this resistance to investigative clarity can be found: in ‘The Sorcerer’, for
example, which ends with ‘he would not tell me more, for he had, it appeared, taken a vow of
secrecy’ (93, 62; 02, 67), and in ‘An Enduring Heart’ ‘there are things it is well not to ponder
over too much, things that bare words are best suited for’ (02, 60). Significantly, the narrator
seems content with this inconclusiveness and the text takes an almost Borgesian delight in
secrecy; both what is withheld from the narrator and what is withheld by the narrator in his
elliptical and stylistic accounts of his thoughts and visions. It is characteristic for Borges, in
well-known stories like ‘The Library of Babel’ and ‘The Book of Sand’, to conjure the spirit
of vast encyclopaedic projects whose indices continually defer the secret knowledge they
promise. Yeats, wittingly or not, engages in something similar when he characterises
folklore as at once ‘the Bible, the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer’.
‘[A]nd well nigh all the great poets have lived by its light’, he adds.60 But what is its light? As
the protagonist in Borges’ ‘The Ethnographer’ says: ‘Now that I possess the secret I could
tell it in a hundred different and contradictory ways.’ Of course, this makes it unclear
whether he ever does tell it, or is done telling it, and whether as readers we ever learn it. We
are told only one thing with finality: ‘he married, divorced, and is now one of the librarians at
Yale’.61 Bathos returns the reader to the obscurity of the text – its occult quality – at the
moment he might expect transcendence – its light. In similar fashion, CT continually taunts
the reader with superficial renderings when we might expect profound significance. The last
sentence of ‘Dreams that have no Moral’ follows the grand telling of a legend with this sly,
if conventional, bathos: ‘I was passing one time myself, and they called me in and gave me
a cup of tea’ (02, 230). Similarly bathetic is the 1902 footnote added to the end of ‘The Thick
Skull of the Fortunate’ which reads:
I wrote all this years ago, out of what were even then old memories. I was in Roughley the
other day, and found it much like other desolate places. I may have been thinking of
Moughorow, a much wilder place, for the memories of one’s childhood are brittle things to
lean upon. (02, 162)
Here, the dissociation of memory makes a mockery of encyclopaedic literalism and
accuracy. The investigative quest to reveal the truth, then, is sublimated by an idiosyncratic
delight in existing distractedly within the text without any factual discovery; and the
uncertainty of the narrator’s status – folklorist, poet, dilettante – reflects the uncertain
status of the text: is it a source book for Yeats’s poetry, a record of the Irish peasantry,
an ethnography, a personal memoir, a collection of essays, fictions or visions? In this way,
by its dissimulation of itself, it puts on trial the methodology for establishing a ‘serious
subject matter’ or an entirely tragic view of an irretrievable folk.
Celtic textuality
The excessive textuality of CT, due to its failure to cohere either as a sacred book or
encyclopaedic totality, is aligned to its folkloric character. From Herder’s original
characterisation of the bible, designating it a species of Hebraic folk literature, to his
insistence that language develops according to imperfect, worldly relations and not a divine
grammar, a strain of profanity runs through the theory of the folk, with the consequence
that any genuine folk encounter possesses what Bakhtin would term a heteroglossic
quality, rather than a single objective reference.62 We have seen how Yeats initially
resisted the comedy of the knave in the name of the ‘true’ peasant; how, then, did he come
to adopt and justify the general knavery of CT? In order to answer this question, I would
like, finally, to consider two of Yeats’s ‘knaves’ as they make their enigmatic appearances
in CT, each carrying the contagion of the Victorian imagination, yet also supplanting it with
a further theoretical reflection upon the textual qualities of a living tradition.
The first of these appears in an almost throwaway encounter in the section entitled
‘Belief and Unbelief’. The narrator begins the section warning us that the peasants are not
simply credulous: although they believe in ‘faeries and little leprechauns, and water-
horses, and fallen angels’, they distrust priests and don’t believe in Hell. We are introduced
to a woman from the western villages and then, remarkably, to:
a man with a Mohawk tattooed upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs
[as the woman]. No matter what one doubts, one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with
the Mohawk Indian on his arm said, they stand to reason. (93, 11– 12; 02, 8)
This is intriguing in the first place because the epistemological hierarchy, which sets
critical doubt above credulity, is challenged. It is clear that the critical perspective
corrosive to religious and spiritual beliefs is itself susceptible to being surpassed by a form
of belief – the faeries stand to ‘reason’. More startling than this, however, is the fact that
the man has a tattoo of a Mohawk on his arm. Perhaps we could read this as a clumsy
attempt on the author’s behalf to identify a confederacy of natural primitives but its almost
casual instantiation suggests a more mischievous function. After all, an Irish peasant with
a Mohawk tattooed on his arm speaking about his belief in the faeries is, within the context
of nineteenth-century folklore and anthropology, an uncanny proposition. Here is a man
wearing the projections of an academic discipline on his body. That he appears not as
314 B. Sheils
a primitive believer but as an allegory of primitive belief – a convenient sign of

primitivism – confronts the narrator with the limitations of his own interpretative
apparatus. Our thought turns to the peasant’s awareness of his market value as an ‘Irish
peasant’ during the time of the Irish Revival; and beyond that to the author’s reflection
upon the compromised modes of ‘scientific’ encounter. The peasant is advertising his
textuality and, by implication, the intertextuality of CT.
But why specifically a Mohawk? Certainly, it offers a reminder of Yeats’s riposte to
Hyde on the subject of the Irish language: that the essence of tradition can be found in the
idiomatic qualities of New World literature. It also makes sense within the context of
Yeats’s contemporary journalism for the American paper The Boston Pilot. It does not
seem far-fetched to suggest that in being open to the currents of American culture in the
1890s, both popular and literary, Yeats would have been sensitive to the growing interest
in the folklore of the Western frontier: Wild West melodramas were common from the
1870s and Buffalo Bill Cody’s infamous Wild West Show was launched in 1883.63
Although there are clear thematic parallels between the myths of the west of Ireland and
those of the American west, each representing at different times, freedom, primitiveness,
and a frontier for emigration, it is the formal apparatus, especially the folk-pantomime of
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which seems to resonate most remarkably within CT.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show is by now a well-known and much revisited travesty:
every time Buffalo Bill Cody got up on stage to fulfil the role of new folkloric hero – the
cowboy – he also continually re-inscribed the near extinction of the Native American
population. The Indian who shot him and the Indian he killed, represented again and again
on stage, helped to establish and consolidate the over-familiar paradigms of the ‘good’
Indian, the ‘bad’ Indian, and, above all else, the anti-modern Indian. In a not dissimilar
fashion, Yeats’s CT ‘peasants’ perform the fate of the nearly extinct Irish language. We
may well imagine the man with a Mohawk tattoo located unexpectedly in the west of
Ireland to be no more than a felicitous crossover between these two cultures; and yet
placed within the synthetic endeavour of CT he comes to epitomise the tradition of
‘translating or retelling’. Not only does he provide the trace of extinction – the last of the
Mohicans64 – upon which the quality of Yeats’s New World tradition is founded, but,
significantly for the aesthetic of CT, he passes over from being a ‘true’ or ‘real’ presence –
another genuine folk informant to be recorded – to attaining the status of pure text – an
informant who has translated or recorded himself in advance of meeting the folklorist.
There is an astute reflection hidden within the fact that this character husbands himself for
the benefit of the folkloric text – presents himself, in effect, as the fiction of tradition –
and it is important to realise that the text is not simply redundant as folklore as a result. On
the contrary, the folkloric sign, pointing to its own artificiality and excessiveness, enacts
the moment of recognition when the tragic yearning for the un-translated, untranslatable
noun gives way to the culture of the verb. In poetic terms, reaching back to Herder’s theory
of language, this performative sign suggests language ‘doing’ and ‘acting’, rather than
simply denoting an object beyond itself. We can further detect how Yeats performs
traditional language, and at the same time makes it traditional, by looking to his Thoreau-
inspired New World lyric, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (1888). Here, as Stephen Regan has
pointed out, he makes poetic capital out of a phonetic coincidence: the Irish name ‘Inis
Fraoigh’ rendered not according to its semantic content ‘Heather Island’ but rather its
anglicised form ‘Innisfree’, which has the handy English connotation of ‘freedom’.65
Yeats’s freedom here is doubly significant, however, since it translates not only the
specific meaning of an Irish noun into a potential verb – the island is a place of
limitless potential for Yeats; a place to act freely – but also the general meaning of the
Irish language, qua original speech, into a form of writing and a textual effect. The ‘free’ in
Innisfree does not mean free exactly, neither does it mean heather: it lives textually
between the two.
The 1890s cast lists for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show record that despite the recruitment
of actors to play some roles – Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok – ‘Buffalo Bill Cody’
continued to be played by Buffalo Bill Cody; a fact which suggests that as well as marking
the extinction of the Native Americans he was inadvertently marking the extinction of
himself. On stage he became, in the form of the mythological cowboy, the trace of a person
who no longer truly existed. The character I have nominated Yeats’s second ‘knave’, the
balladeer, ragamuffin and genius Michael Moran, also known, significantly, as the ‘Last
Gleeman’, suffers from a similar fate: his own extinction on stage. It is worth pointing out
that Moran is city-born and an habitué of the Dublin Liberties. This is not so unusual in CT,
which presents several instances of border crossing from city to country and vice versa.66
Indeed, the possibility of an urban folk is essential for Yeats, to the extent that the acts of
performing-as-folk and writing folklore necessitate this characteristically ‘modern’ back
and forth. Moran is introduced to the reader as blind – i.e. ‘dark’ – and satiric in character.
One day he travels to his ‘usual station at Essex Bridge’ and finds himself usurped by an
impersonator. ‘Is it possible that none of yez can know me? Don’t yez see it’s myself; and
that’s someone else?’ he asks the crowd who have gathered to listen. But ‘the pretender’
proceeds with his act and the crowd take Moran for an impostor instead. Indeed, they are
about to ‘belabour him’ with a stick when they fall back ‘bewildered anew by his close
resemblance to himself’ (93, 67 –82; 02, 79 – 90). At this moment Moran is granted the
ultimate folkloric role: the role of having to play himself at the expense of his simple
originality. At the same time, the unnamed impersonator, instead of being exposed as an
impostor and a poor copy of the original Moran, as might have been the case had Yeats still
been focused on issues of folkloric authenticity, is permitted his performative
accomplishment. The undecideability which results from his performance, depicted by
the crowd’s bewilderment – which man is the genuine Moran? – is a radical admission of
textual effect and the comedy of gesture. It is also, I suggest, besides being a further moment
of textuality which distinguishes the representational apparatus of CT, an important
historical reflection on the so-called inauthenticity of other Celticist texts or part-texts such
as Macpherson’s Ossian poems or Herder’s Volkslieder. When Yeats tempered the literary
caricature of the Victorian writers from his 1888 anthology, he did so on the basis that he was
navigating himself closer to an authentic origin – the simple life of the folk – but in The
Celtic Twilight the precariousness of this editorial position is continually exposed as he
employs literary caricature to reveal this origin’s absence.
Conclusion
In this article, rather than reaffirm commonplace connections between eighteenth-century
German romantic Weltsmertz and the elegiac sentimentality of late nineteenth-century
Celticism I have sought a different affinity, specifically between Herder and Yeats, based
on the synthetic and literary qualities of the folk tradition. I have suggested that underlying
this conception of tradition is a modern, aesthetic theory of knowledge and an alternative
to dominant analytic-philosophical characterisations of Enlightenment thought; and that
this theory disrupts and fragments the conventional objects of epistemology. Finally, I have
detected a profane laughter running through folk traditionalism which, projected onto the
New World, signals this necessary fragmentation of origins, of language and of the folk
themselves, and conditions the multiple representations of poetry and life.
316 B. Sheils
In response to those critics who would claim that the textual effects of CT are an
unintended consequence of its publications history and its political context, and in direct
contradiction to Yeats’s deep beliefs, in spiritualism, for example, I offer the argument that
a folk style and a modern text of folk effects are consonant with the poet’s continual
negotiations between the popular and the occult traditions, as well as with his theories of
the mask, sprezzatura, the actor, and the Irish stage.67 Translation and regret; laughter
and extinction: these are hallmarks of Yeats’s best and darkest poetry. They are also
established as the folkloric code of CT. Paddy Flynn, Yeats’s chief CT ‘informant’, is
a comic and irascible character but, most significantly perhaps, he is no longer with us.
I have copied this account of Paddy Flynn, with a few verbal alterations, from a notebook
which I almost filled with his tales and sayings, shortly after seeing him. I look now at the
note-book regretfully, for the blank pages at the end will never be filled up. Paddy Flynn is
dead. (93, 5; 02, 05)
There is something comedic about Yeats’s reflection here upon a record which admits to
being incomplete yet grants itself licence to make alterations to its source. Do the abysmal,
never-to-be-filled pages at the back of the notebook signal the perennial imperfection of
Yeats’s representations or rather of Paddy’s life itself? Which is to ask, what do we possess
of Paddy’s life but its original imperfection, and that imperfectly?
Notes
1. Seamus Deane and W.J. McCormack are both strongly critical of Yeats’s hieratic, and
specifically Anglo-Irish, idealism. Deane, Celtic Revivals; McCormack, Blood Kindred and
From Burke to Beckett. The benignancy of the postcolonial idiom in Yeats studies, on the other
hand, is exemplary: see Kiberd, Inventing Ireland; Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonisation’.
2. Watson, Irish Identity and the Literary Revival, 98.
3. Yeats, Explorations, 401.
4. Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival; Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore and
Occultism; Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore; Chaudhry, Yeats.
5. Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival, 2.
6. Indeed, although the rise of ‘scientific’ anthropology towards the end of the nineteenth century
has often been marked out as a significant paradigm shift in terms of how knowledge of
‘primitive’ cultures was created, there is little reason to think of the romantic tradition which
preceded it as unscientific. Characteristically, there is a strong bond between scientific
naturalism and nature poetry; and the tradition of Celticism to which Yeats was most closely
affiliated early in his life was exemplarily romantic, in so far as it combined antiquarian science
with emotional identification. As Garrigan Mattar points out, Yeats was enthralled by the
unscientific mythography of Standish O’Grady and the scientific cachet of La Revue Celtique
equally (Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival, 39).
7. Diarmuid O’Giollain states that ‘Folklore is predicated on the death of tradition’, underlining
the context of Enlightenment scientism and political modernity from which the study of
folklore emerged: ‘“Folklore” was conceptualised towards the end of the eighteenth century,
coined as a word in 1846 and institutionalised from the end of the nineteenth century on’
(O’Giollain, Locating Irish Folklore 8, 32).
8. I will be using two substantially different editions of this text: Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Men
and Women, Dhouls and Faeries, 1893 (CT 93); and Yeats, The Celtic Twilight, 1902 (CT 02).
The Celtic Twilight was, and remains, a controversial text for folklorists: Irish folklorist Kevin
Danaher considered Yeats an artistic blunderer, ‘far from the clear black and white of folk
tradition’, the American Richard Dorson called it ‘a musing, introspective diary playing with
the shadowy folk beliefs of fairy powers’ (qtd in Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 123).
Yeats, however, ‘excepted’ it from his general criticism of his early prose works, suggesting
that he held it in some regard (Yeats’s 1933 ‘Preface’ to Letters to the New Island, 5).
9. Deane, Celtic Revivals, 28 – 50.
10. It has been suggested that Deane displays a naive belief in the possibility of disentangling Yeats’s
mythical sensibility from historical actuality here (see McDonald, Serious Poetry, 151); and
certainly I would agree that it marks a limit of Deane’s project that he prefers to consider Yeats’s
myth-making as politically suspicious. His occasional failure to recognise this limit leaves him
open to over-assertive statements about romanticism and aesthetics. For instance, he notes that
romanticism (which he nominates as the tradition of Coleridge, Blake, Carlyle and William
Morris) considered history as ‘essentially engaged with the imagination and, therefore, almost
indistinguishable from aesthetics’ (Celtic Revivals, 30). This is a problem, according to Deane,
because it puts historical reality in the service of myth. In the specifically Irish context he notes
that John Millington Synge and Austin Clarke, as well as Yeats, created ‘imaginatively useful’
rather than ‘historically accurate’ ideas about Ireland, ‘yielding a sense of the artist’s enterprise
in a world which, without these metaphorical suasions, would remain implacably hostile’(Celtic
Revivals, 32). As a consequence of trying to expose this historical ‘inaccuracy’, Deane ends up
impoverishing Yeats’s whole aesthetic into an ideal obligation ‘to despise the modern world, and
to seek rescue from it’ (Celtic Revivals, 33), which raises a reflective question about Deane’s own
apparent access to the material of history.
11. Deane, Strange Country.
12. Ibid., 19.
13. In the 1760s Macpherson claimed to have uncovered ancient Gaelic manuscripts of poems by
a third-century bard Ossian on a tour of the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland, which he
then translated into English and published in Edinburgh. As it turns out, these ‘original’
manuscripts were never produced and the source of these ‘found’ Scottish epics was a combination
of oral folklore, a sixteenth-century manuscript The Book of the Dean of Lismore, and
Macpherson’s own imagination. Deane is not the only critic to point out the precedent of Scotland
in respect of the rise of cultural nationalism in Ireland; Fiona Stafford, Luke Gibbons and Howard
Gaskill have all noted it. Gaskill, Ossian Revisited and ‘Herder, Ossian and the Celtic’, 257–72;
Stafford, The Sublime Savage; Gibbons, ‘The Sympathetic Bond’, 272–92.
14. Yeats certainly did have access to broader European ideas of the folk and folk art through his
contact with William Morris in particular, but also through the cultural influences of Carlyle,
Ruskin and Pater.
15. Herder, ‘Excerpt from a Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples’, 229.
16. Ibid. Herder’s correspondence on the subject of Ossian with the Irish soldier Harold raised his
suspicions about the authenticity of the poems, yet his enthusiasm for them exceeded mere
antiquarian doubt. The reasons for this are, as we shall see, philosophical. For a fuller
discussion of this topic, see Betteridge, ‘The Ossianic Poems in Herder’s Volkslieder’, 334– 8.
17. See Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History, 18.
18. Critics have long abandoned the idea that Herder was an irrationalist simply opposed to the
ideas of the French Enlightenment. As Barnard is quick to point out, Herder’s idea of
nationhood was not an atavistic retrenchment in the face of intellectual revolution:
Herder was undoubtedly among the first to acclaim the French Revolution not as a cataclysmic lapse
of continuity but as the most continuously significant occurrence since the Reformation. Similarly,
despite pioneering the idea of nationhood in its modern sense, he was fully awake to the dangers of
racist variants and ethnic imperialism. (Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History, 4–5)
R.E. Norton makes a similarly succinct case for considering the sophistication of Herder’s
response to Enlightenment rationalism: ‘This traditional view of Herder as an irrational
iconoclast, as the irresistible opponent of a moribund Enlightenment, has by now lost much of its
argumentative force and integrity’ (Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment, 1).
19. Herder, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind’, 233.
20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 275.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy find in German Romanticism the birth of
literary theory (The Literary Absolute, 12). This ‘literary absolute’ suggests a fruitful way of
thinking about the theoretical provenance of the folk and also of disrupting strictly rationalist
conceptions of theory.
24. He articulates this cultural making through the term Kraft. Kraft, meaning ‘force’ in English,
originated as a fairly rarefied philosophical concept for Herder, signifying a means of
synthesising ‘traditionally irreconcilable antitheses’ such as ‘mind’ and ‘body’. However, its
later association with traditional folk practices of art should give us a sense of how it was
318 B. Sheils
generally applied to the acts which create or express a coherent form of culture. See Nisbet,
Herder’s Scientific Thought, 8 –9.
25. J.G. Herder, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan, vol. IV (Berlin: Weidmannsche
Buchhandlung, 1877), 21; qtd in Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment, 2.
26. ‘ . . . all of my representations are sensate – they are dark – sensate and dark were long ago
proven to be synonymous expressions’ (Herder, ‘Essay on Being [Versuch über das Sein]’
Werke, 11). Norton provides an excellent close reading of this essay (Herder’s Aesthetics and
the European Enlightenment, 11 – 50). For a discussion of the positive valuation of obscurity
and its relation to the science of aesthetics see also Jeffrey Barnouw:
There are many passages in Herder’s writings where ‘dark’ or ‘obscure ideas’ take on a
particular power and resonance. Is this part of an irrationalist reaction against Enlightenment
epistemology? I will argue, on the contrary, that Herder’s positive evaluation of the obscure
carries forward a main theme of Leibniz’s insight into the virtues of confused ideas. (‘The
Cognitive Value of Confusion and Obscurity in the German Enlightenment’, 29)
The terrain set out by Barnouw suggests why Herder, though possessing a critical impulse to
bring obscure truths to distinctness, begins to formally recognise mankind’s habituation in
darkness, and the indistinctness of man’s original consciousness which ends up having to be
excavated from under the blaze of clear and distinct objects.
27. Herder, ‘Essay on the Origin of Language’, 87.
28. Herder did not reject the divine metaphysic outright but he did grant a kind of divine agency to
the poet. Instead of imitating what the transcendent God had already created – static nature –
the poet genius is endowed with the ability to imitate the act of creation itself. ‘In giving names
to all, and ordering all from the impulse of his own inward feeling, and with reference to
himself, he becomes an imitator of the Divinity, a second Creator, a true poetes, a creative poet’
(Herder, ‘The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry’, 240). This is the philosophical antecedent to Yeats’s
famous metaphor of the lamp: ‘that soul must become its own betrayer, its own deliverer, the
one activity, the mirror turn lamp’ (Yeats, ‘Introduction’, xxxiii).
29. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language, 92.
30. Ibid., 127.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 109.
33. Ibid., 96 – 7.
34. Ibid., 132.
35. Stith Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature (1932 – 7) is perhaps the most well-known
folk grammar.
36.
I deeply regret when I find that some folk-lorist is merely scientific, and lacks the needful
subtle imaginative sympathy to tell his stories well . . . I object to the ‘honest folk-lorist’
not because his versions are accurate, but because they are inaccurate, or rather incomplete.
(Yeats, ‘Poetry and Science in Folklore’ (1890), in Uncollected Prose, 174)
37. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 3. This volume includes Fairy and Folk Tales of the
Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy Tales (1892).
38. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 401– 6.
39. Yeats, Representative Irish Tales, 25.
40. The collection included tales from writers with varying degrees of association and/or sympathy
with Ireland, including William Carleton (Yeats’s avowed favourite), Maria Edgeworth,
Samuel Lover, T. Croften Croker, Chares Lever and Charles Kickam.
41. Yeats, Representative Irish Tales, 26.
42. Chaudhry, Yeats, 173–4.
43. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, 7.
44. Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival, 50.
45. Yeats, ‘Review of Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories by Douglas Hyde’
(1890), in Uncollected Prose, 187.
46. Yeats, ‘Review of Hyde’s The Story of Gaelic Literature’ (Bookman, 1895), in Uncollected
Prose, 359.
47. Chaudhry, Yeats, 60.
48.
When their respective movements gathered momentum in the latter half of the 1890s, Hyde and
Yeats diverged somewhat, but their efforts continually reinforced each other’s. Even if one
noted only those activities that are recorded in Foster’s biography of Yeats, their record of
mutual aid is impressive: Yeats speaking at Gaelic League functions in 1897, 1899, 1900, 1902,
and 1910; Hyde joining in the luncheon that celebrated the launch of the Irish Literary Theatre
in 1899; Hyde intervening on Yeats’s behalf with Irish-Ireland newspaper editors in 1899 and
1901; Yeats, Hyde and Lady Gregory collaborating on the controversial play Where There is
Nothing in 1902; Yeats including review comments on Irish language drama in issues of
Samhain from 1902 to 1904; and Yeats speaking on behalf of the language revival while touring
the United States in 1903 and 1904. (McMahon, Grand Opportunity, 31)
49. Yeats, ‘The De-anglicising of Ireland’ (United Ireland, 17 December 1892), in Uncollected
Prose, 254–6.
50. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, 255.
51. Ibid.
52. Chaudhry, Yeats, 108.
53. Ibid., 147.
54. Ibid., 156.
55. Yeats, Mythologies, 1.
56. It is difficult for the modern reader to know which edition or amalgam of editions she is
reading. For example, the edition edited by Kathleen Raine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe,
1981) claims to be the 1902 edition, but, in fact, is an edited version of 1902 (closer to the 1925
edition found in Mythologies) with several of the sections having been foreshortened and
deprived of their more reflective and meta-textual moments. For example, at the end of the
section ‘The Golden Age’, after a reflection upon peasant beliefs, both the 1893 and 1902
editions end with ‘We were now getting into the big glass-roofed terminus, and the fiddler put
away his old blacking box and held out his hat for a copper, and then opened the door and was
gone’ (93, 185; 02, 175). This is missing from Raine’s edition, which is a pity since it
establishes the importance of the narrative frame, especially the modern, urban image of the
rail terminus intruding upon, but also encompassing, the folkloric material.
57. Thuente suggests that this footnote appears in the 1902 edition (Thuente, W.B. Yeats and Irish
Folklore, 141), but I can only find it in a later 1905 edition (Dublin: Maunsel, 15), which is in most
other respects identical to 1902. In 1902 the line with respect to Russell’s poetry is simply omitted.
58. Thuente, W.B Yeats and Irish Folklore, 124.
59. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 109.
60. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, 284.
61. Borges, Collected Fictions, 334– 5.
62. Bakhtin’s theory of ‘heteroglossia’ – conflicting varieties of speech within a single linguistic
code – privileges the novel form. My argument here, emphasising the essential imperfection
and multiplicity of the folk, infers the theory to the question of poetry in Herder and Yeats.
63. Sagala, Buffalo Bill on Stage. There has been some attempt to discuss the specifically Irish
co-ordinates in the myths of the American West. Marguerite Quintelli-Neary, for example,
points to the Irish heritage of Mary Jane Cannary, (otherwise known as Calamity Jane) and
speculates as to mythic affinities between Billy the Kid and Fionn MacCumhaill (The Irish
American Myth of the Frontier West). We know that Yeats was an avid reader of Western
fictions later in his life and the echo of this can certainly be found in his Crazy Jane poems.
64. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, by James Fenimore Cooper, was published in
1826.
65. Regan, ‘W.B. Yeats and Irish Cultural Politics in the 1890s’, 76.
66. See note 53 above for an example of this crossing from country to city.
67. We might detect an early and unconscious affinity between Yeats and his ‘strong enchanter’
Friedrich Nietzsche in this conception of folk style. In his notebooks Nietzsche wrote: ‘The
damned folk soul! . . . What is German as a quality of style – that is yet to be found, just as
among the Greeks the Greek style was found only late: an earlier unity did not exist, only
a terrible mixture’ (The Portable Nietzsche, 41). According to the legacy of Herder, this search
for style is not contra the folk tradition; it is rather an expression of that tradition’s essence.
320 B. Sheils
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‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats, J.G. Herder and the

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‘Dark cognition’: W.B. Yeats, J.G. Herder and the

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