Ireland's 'Two Cultures' Debate: Victorian Science and the Literary Revival‪.‬

In her 1928 essay The Strange Necessity, Rebecca West describes the poet W.B. Yeats as a quintessentially self-made man, whose risible pursuit of a Celtic spirituality was largely the fault of his Anglo-Irish forerunners. The English in Ireland, having abandoned the domestic instincts of a middle-class 'unafraid to examine the nature of the universe', evolved into a weakened, disengaged aristocracy whose inadequacies with regard to scientific and social analysis left a void for the young poet to fill. Like Scarf ace Capone, removed from the secure religious traditions of an Italian homeland and let loose to create havoc on the formless stage of Chicago, Yeats flourished, claims West, in the absence of any restraining intellectual community. Unharnessed by pre-existing Irish traditions of scientific speculation, he was free to generate for himself a new and naive interpretation of the cosmos: Therefore a mystic like Mr Yeats, when he sits down to consider what the parts of the universe that have not been illuminated by the clear moonbeam of his vision may be like, finds nothing to fill in the blanks except the primitive Irishman's world of the Sidhe, which is the result of analyses and syntheses of experiences so much simpler than his own that they are as ridiculous as matter for his pen as a sailor suit would be as apparel for his limbs. (1)