‘Risings’ Tells the Story of How a Mix of Yeats and Bullets Inspired Irish Independence

Is the pen truly mightier than the sword? An answer in the affirmative is offered by “Rising: The Irish Literary Revival and the Making of a Nation,” mounted jointly by the New York Public Library and the Grolier Club. The show’s subject is the “formation of Irish identity through the Irish Literary Revival” and the “parallel political quest for Irish nationhood.” For a nation to be built, the exhibition argues, it must first be dreamt.Ireland, the 150 objects on display here testify, was built with words and weapons in equal measure. The thesis is an intriguing one — that an explosion in Irish letters occurred at precisely the moment that the Emerald Isle’s political independence appeared foreclosed. The Famine of the 1850’s had precipitated a migration of biblical proportions and ravaged those who stayed. Uprisings in 1848 and 1878 failed to dislodge London’s rule.Another political heartbreak came with the fall from grace of Charles Stewart Parnell, a champion of Irish independence who exerted such a charismatic forcefield that he came to be known as the “uncrowned king of Ireland.” Parnell’s push for home rule, though, was thwarted in 1890 by the scandal of his affair with a married woman, Katherine O’Shea. The aborted promise of Parnell left an imprint on, among others, James Joyce.‘Constitution of the Free State of Ireland.’ Published by the Stationery Office, 1922. Via Grolier ClubThis political failure was set against one of the 19th century’s great tragedies — the Famine and subsequent exodus of the 1840s and 1850s that would claim a million lives and lead to the exodus of another two million, halving Ireland’s population in the process. The exhibition contains a first edition of “The Irish Crisis,” by, in Charles Treveylan, a British civil servant who called the agonies of the Hunger “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.”With Ireland’s political future foreclosed, figures like William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge looked backwards towards the nation’s Celtic lore and Gaeilge, its ancient language. A set of old-new legends were summoned by poets and playwrights, ghosts gussied up by geniuses. Yeats and Gregory were hardly acute political thinkers, but they understood that crafting a nation was a matter of myth just as much as militias.Neither Gregory nor Yeats ever approached fluency in Irish, though she pioneered a Gaeilge-inflected English prose style she dubbed “Kiltartanese.” Their alliance was one with few equals in literary history. To them are owed the splendors of the Irish Literary Revival as well as the founding of the Abbey Theatre in 1904. The next year, Arthur Griffiths would found Sinn Féin to advance the “moral authority of the Irish nation.”Some 50,000 Irishmen died in World War I fighting alongside those who were oppressing them at home. The exhibition’s central political event is the Easter Rising, which transpired on April 24, 1916. The zenith was Padraic Pearse’s reading of the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic” on the steps of Dublin’s General Post Office. Lady Gregory called the ensuing violence the “Dublin tragedy.” After five days of the Rising, 500 people were killed by British forces, including 16 of the leaders, who were condemned to death after secret trials. The show preserves a manuscript copy of Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916.” In it Yeats declares “I write it out in a verse—/MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and PearseNow and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn,Are changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born.”‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ manuscript. W.B. Yeats, 1890. First published in The National Observer, 1890. Via Grolier ClubThe Irish defeat of the British auxiliary units known as the Black and Tans in 1921 led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the creation of the Irish Free State, under whose terms the six northern counties remained under British rule. So contentious was that resolution that a civil war broke out against those who supported the accord and those who found it unacceptable. The day was carried by the pro-treaty Free State government led by Éamon de Valera.This correspondent attended a lecture connected with the exhibition. It was given by the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín. The author of “Brooklyn” noted that in Joyce’s “Ulysses,” set on June 16, 1904, hardly a single British character is given a speaking role. In fiction, at least, London’s “yoke had already been cast off.” As another visionary of national revival of an ancient people, Theodor Herzl, put it, “if you will it, it is no dream.”

‘Risings’ Tells the Story of How a Mix of Yeats and Bullets Inspired Irish Independence

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