Chapter 4 considers the project of worldmaking and the concept of personality from the perspective of two prose genres that dominated Yeats’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s: autobiography and occult philosophy. My justification for bringing these genres together lies in an understanding of how they are used in his exploration of personality and aesthetic Bildung. The logic of misrecognition can be discerned not only in Yeats’s growing understanding of the self/anti-self dichotomy but also in the the process by which he learns, at the hands of sometimes deceptive instructors, the secrets of the spirit world. Yeats’s spiritual journey in A Vision frames a cosmic system in which personality, understood as a dialectics of self and anti-self, defines many of the historical figures who exemplify the phases of the moon. In Autobiographies, he becomes increasingly aware of the need to document his own personality with the rectifying aim of discovering the “age-long memoried self” that coexists with his ordinary “daily self” (Au 216). Each text creates in its own fashion the contours and atmosphere of a world in which the past – on the one hand, through recollection; on the other, through an understanding of the historical gyres – retains its vitality and presentness.

In the conclusion, I reflect on Yeats’s “A General Introduction for my Work” of 1937. It is an unusual text, meant originally to introduce his collected works but left unpublished until the posthumous Essay and Introductions (1961). It leads a negative dialectical existence, severed from its original place and left to perform a fugitive function with respect to the poet’s own oeuvre. For this reason, perhaps, it serves less as an introduction than as an epilogue, a summation of certain key ideas about revivalism, his poetry, and his occult works. Yeats sees from the vantage point of his later years that his literary style – as well as the worlds it creates in his work – could only have emerged from the bedrock of the self. Two years after Yeats composed his “General Introduction,” W. H. Auden, in his elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” wrote that after his death, the poet “is scattered among a hundred cities,” part of a vital future he had to leave behind: “The words of a dead man /Are modified in the guts of the living.” It is just this sort of continuance and renewal that characterize Yeats’s revivalism and his hope for coming times.

In Chapter 5, on Yeats’s series of plays about the legendary warrior Cuchulain, I return to the early period to take up a thread of Yeats’s development as a dramatist in order to illustrate a crucial aspect of his worldmaking project. The legendary world that he envisioned in this series evolved out of his need to overcome the intransmissibility of indigenous Irish culture in anything like an original or authentic form, a problem that Yeats confronted when he considered the role of folklore and legend in a national literature. The plays are also well suited, by virtue of the temporal extension of the series – from the first production of On Baile’s Strand (1904) to the composition of The Death of Cuchulain (1939) – to convey Yeats’s developing sense of personality and the ethics of heroism. By transposing the heroic world of Cuchulain, particularly as described by Standish O’Grady and Augusta Gregory, to the contemporary stage, Yeats does not revive the past in the interests of preserving it in amber. His task, like that of the literary revival at large, was not just to express the vitality of the past and its ethos but to place both at the forefront of a modern national literary movement.

Chapter 1 establishes the contours of the Irish Revival and revivalism as we have come to understand both today. Understood as a constellation of movements, discourses, and practices, the Revival was a modernizing force in a media environment that encouraged multiple visions of Ireland’s past and its future. My discussion of the Irish Revival and revivalism situates Yeats’s literary revivalism within a broader cultural context. I argue that the Revival’s message was often constructed in a modern media environment as part of a process of remediation, whereby revivalist texts, often first published in the daily newspapers, were republished and recontextualized so that they might be recognized anew and with greater understanding. These texts also served a remedial function – that is, they were part of revivalist emphasis on self-improvement. Yeats, in concert with revivalists across a wide political spectrum, helped forge the idea of a national consciousness and a modern national literature in which the legends of ancient Ireland would find a place.

This essay explores the Irish Literary Revival in relation to the poetry and philosophy of W. B. Yeats and science. When we examine Yeats’s view of science and his repudiation of Locke and Newton, among others, in poetry, it is easy to come to the understanding that the poet was wholly anti-materialist and anti-scientific and brought this to bear on his espousal of the Irish Revival. However, this essay argues that what Yeats does in his thinking, rather, is reverse the understanding of science as ordered. For Yeats, the self-conscious application of materialism is a fallacy and he rejects such determinism in favour of a multidimensional world view that is in accordance with the new physics of his day. In this way, the cultural revival in its appropriation of the Gaelic past becomes filled with the potency of past, present, and future as one, and this symbolic efficacy allows for an expression of nationality that is ultimately a form of consciousness, a new world view made manifest through what Schrödinger terms ‘a return to antiquity’.

In this chapter Katherine O’Callaghan highlights the crucial fact that, for many Irish writers of the Irish Revival, the West was a rhetorical construction through-and-through; most of them never had the opportunity to travel there: “For most Irish artists in the first half of the twentieth century, the West of Ireland was a place encountered not through personal visits or deep study, but through the paintings, sketches, and accounts of others.” Her essay begins by noting that “While access to the West had been improved by the extension of the railway – the Achill Sound train station had opened in 1895 – travel to and around the West was still challenging” for most. Annette Hemphill’s little-known diary, written in 1906 but published only in 1991 as Rambles of Four in Western Mayo, sets a poignant ethnographic tone in this essay that stretches from John Millington Synge and James Joyce to Daryll Figgis’s Children of the Earth, published in 1918, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, published in 1949.