Belief and Unbelief: Nationalist Doubt in W.B. Yeats's the Celtic Twilight (Critical Essay‪)‬

The Celtic Twilight (1893) has the unique status amongst Yeats's works of being often referenced but rarely analyzed. Many critics use it as a brief starting point for their arguments about literary craft, Yeats's life, gender issues, or nationalism. Most dismiss its literary value: Richard Ellmann described its style as 'the awkwardness of excessive simplicity', and concludes that 'this is not good writing, but can be defended as good discipline'. (1) Edward Hirsch contends that it 'is not wholly successful either as a folklore collection or as a work of imaginative fiction. Yet the book plays an important part in Yeats's development'. (2) Even Kathleen Raine, despite her generally positive introduction to the 1981 publication of the volume, believes that it 'does not show him to be particularly gifted as a collector of folklore' but that it 'marks an important development [...] as a poet'. (3) To his fellow modernists, the title became a term of abuse, synonymous with shallow vagueness: Robert McAlmon found Yeats's poetry 'too Irish twilighty' and T.S. Eliot remarked that '[t]he Yeats of the Celtic twilight' wrote in 'a phase of confusion' in which his work showed a 'lack of complete emotional expression'. (4) Dismissal of The Celtic Twilight is part of a larger tendency to disregard his entire output from the decade, and Hirsch points out that this process began with Yeats himself. Towards the end of his life the poet referred to his early volume as 'a bit of ornamental trivial needlework sewn on a prophetic fury got by Blake and Boeheme'. (5) Stephen Regan summarizes the critical consensus: 'it is commonly accepted that the 1890s were essentially a time of transition for Yeats, a dabbling with the palette in preparation for the big canvases to come'. (6)