ABSTRACT
Although Yeats never ceased to identify himself as an Irish nationalist, the author’s defi nition of nationalism and literature’s place in it became increasingly individualistic and defensive in the decades he spent founding and managing the National Theatre movement. In 1888, Yeats wrote that “One can only reach out to the universe with a gloved hand-that glove is one’s nation, the only thing one knows even a little of” (Letters to the New Island 174). Twenty years later, in a letter to Annie Horniman, he reiterated this attachment to his nation somewhat more wearily: “I understand my own race and in all my work, both lyric and dramatic, I have thought of it. If the theatre fails I may or may not write plays-but I shall write for my own people-whether in love or hate matters little-probably I shall not know which it is” (The Letters of W. B. Yeats 21). Both statements assert that an author can only understand and express himself through the lens of a national identity, but the envisioned relationships between author and nation differ radically. In 1888, Yeats imagines a symbiosis, where artist and nation fi t together as hand and glove. By 1908, this symbiosis has been replaced by a murky antagonism that borders on pathology, where the poet is still inextricably attached to his people but can no longer discern why he writes for them or predict how they will receive him.
