Seamus Deane, from "Yeats and the Idea of Revolution," in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980 (Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Wake Forest University Press, 1987).

The apparently contradictory (though not unprecedented) combination of revolutionary spirit and social traditionalism in Yeats is addressed by Seamus Deane in this essay. Rejecting the utilitarianism and commercialization of modern society, Yeats had embraced a notion of Irishness, embodied in particular in his images of the aristocracy and the peasant. Deane examines the politics of Yeats's position, and the charge that his position was to some degree fascist.

This is the Coleridgean notion of the English community rephrased in an Hibernian idiom. The colony, Ireland, has now become the motherland of historical memory. The actual motherland, England, has become degraded past recognition. We thus discover in Yeats the process of a complex act of colonial repossession, linguistic symptoms of which are to be heard also in Synge's Preface to The Playboy of the Western Worldwhen he says:'It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took his inkhorn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children. In Ireland, those of us who know the people have the same privilege'. 'Those of us who know the people'—a perfect colonial phrase. Yeats considered himself to be one of those too; he wasn't, in that sense, one of 'the people'. His so-called fascism is, in fact, an almost pure specimen of the colonialist mentality....

To describe Yeats's politics, and to a large extent his achievement, as colonial is not at all to diminish it. His career is, especially in its close, marked by incoherence and by an almost wilful mysticism. Yet his demand was always that Ireland should retain its culture by keeping awake its consciousness of metaphysical questions. By doing so it kept its own identity and its links with ancient European culture alive. As always with Yeats, to be traditionalist in the modern world was to be revolutionary.