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This paper examines the ways in which Yeats constructs and idealizes his Anglo-Irish Identity. After bitter disputes over Synge's plays he realized the insoluble opposition between the Irish Catholic and the Anglo-Irish, which meant his failure to unify Ireland through his Celtic Romanticism. He needed to make a new poetics to justify his predicament and to form a new identity. He creates, in his essays and poems, the identity and tradition of the Anglo-Irish from Burke through Swift, Goldsmith, Parnell to Synge and Yeats, the intellectuals who tried to
enlighten the native Irish people only to fail and be isolated from them. According to Yeats, the reason the Anglo-Irish intellectuals had to meet the same fate in Ireland is due to the ignorance and sectarian hate of native Catholic Irish people.
Although the Anglo-Irish always become victims, their defeat is considered by Yeats to be inescapable and even worthier than success in the reality where ignorance prevails. This is the discourse of tragic heroism.
Yeats constructed the identity that is based on the dichotomy between the few Anglo-Irish and the Irish people, by which he attributes culture to the one, and nature to the other. Here culture is supposed to be superior to nature and that sense of superiority rests on the ability to culturalize nature. Yeats connected the culture with breeding which means being cultivated by discipline and education. In writing, it was through his poetics of mask, what he called “the sense of style,” that he could overcome his rage and hate to the mass and futhermore transform them to
the higher virtues such as reason, manners and beauty.
As the poems dealing with the Anglo-Irish big house and the Thoor Ballylee show, in their tradition what they have inherited is a heroic spirit of overcoming and transforming the adversity each generation has faced. Some critics have asserted Yeats shows de-mystifying recognition when he reveals his ancestors' illicit and unjust violence to the native Irish in the past. But we have to note that it finally leads to justifying his Anglo-Irish violence, for he thought it had been transformed by their overcoming spirit and efforts into order and culture whereas the violence of
the Irish mass resulted into disorder and chaos.
David Lloyd's opinion needs to be reconsidered in this regard. He praised Yeats's de-mystifying insights in some later poems and asserted, borrowing Paul de Man's terms, his writing is allegorical rather than symbolic. But in the poems he cited Yeats seems to be more interested in heroicizing and idealizing his Anglo-Irish identity and tradition. Yeats's Anglo-Irish identity should be understood as an response to the changed reality and is formed by his peculiar writing or representation.