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W. B. Yeats's Search for National Identity and His Writing: Tragic Heroism

This paper examines the relation between W. B. Yeats’s search for national identity and his writing presented in the discourse of tragic heroism. Yeats, as an Anglo-Irish, tries to solve the problem of the split identity through the ideal of the unified Ireland. Thus, to overcome the conflict between the Catholic and the Protestant Irish, he places England as their common enemy and emphasizes a pure spirit and emotionalism inherited from Irish tradition in contrast with the English materialism and logocentrism. This tradition constitutes the national discourse of tragic heroism. This discourse is characterized by a romantic heroism in which the Irish hero wins a spiritually higher victory even though he is defeated or dies in reality. It is true that the motivation behind this tragic heroism was to justify the crisis and isolation of the Anglo-Irish. Nonetheless, by dint of this tragic heroism, Yeats aims to create the national subject in the active search for life and to realize the ideal unifying art with life in the new Irish community. Although most of Yeats's early poems are tinged with an escape melancholy due to his recognition of the dissociation of the ideal and real world, they can be understood as a process of exploring the possibility of tragic heroism of the ideal competing the real. Yeats tries to maximize human desire/longing for the ideal world by exploiting the real. As a way of creating a unified nation, Yeats's writing is based on his symbolism which is said to be “a means to a narrative of desire.” But as shown in the conflicts surrounding his play, The Countess Cathleen and Synge's play, The Playboy of the Western world, he fails to achieve the Unity of Nation and Culture through his poetics. The achievement and limitation of his tragic heroism provides a good example to the current problems of national identity.