In 1904, Yeats congratulated George Bernard Shaw on having acquired ‘a geographical conscience’ (CL3 661). By setting John Bull’s Other Island largely in Ireland, Shaw had at last done something for literary nationalism. But was Yeats’s own conscience entirely clear? When campaigning for the Irish Revival, he suppressed – psychologically as much as strategically – what he owed to English literature, to Romanticism in England and Scotland, to ‘aesthetic poetry’, to the Rhymers’ Club: a metropolitan hub for poets from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Yeats’s ‘British’ dimension (not to be confused with ‘Anglo-Irishness’ as a presumed caste or class) has already made various appearances in this book and is, up to a point, a critical truism. Even so, to advertise it seems like throwing him to the wolves of the Gaelic League or postcolonial theory. But, for my purposes here, ‘Yeats’s other island’ will be less a ‘geographical’ entity than a key site of his presence in modern poetry.

‘Near to the Sligo quay’

With the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland breaking down into devolved parts, or possibly breaking up, has come greater awareness of its ramifications. Both ‘union’ and ‘nation’ have had more than one meaning over the centuries. Given the historical and semantic variables, the jury may forever be out as to whether British-Irish relations fit an extra-Britannic, extra-European colonial pattern (compare Africa and India); whether, in ‘colonial’ and other respects, they belong to internal European dynamics (compare the Hapsburg Empire); whether ceaseless traffic across the Irish Sea has as significantly ‘entwined’ as estranged the islands (compare Scandinavia); or whether all of the above applies. In Ireland and Empire (2000), Stephen Howe refers to ‘unique hybrid forms, involving extensive integration and consensual partnership as well as exploitation and coercion’. Meanwhile Northern Ireland (where the jury may be) remains poised between mosaic and melting pot. It also points to a religious element in the ‘whethers’. Academic paradigm shifts have accompanied, sometimes led, the shifts in consciousness: an ‘extensive literature on territorial politics and identity in Britain and in Ireland has expanded enormously since 1997’. That includes moves to reconceive Yeats’s islands in ‘archipelagic’ terms, which potentially affect how we understand the contexts of his poetry’s composition and reception.