A classic essay on the use of ethnic nationalism and nativism in the decades between Parnell’s death and the Good Friday agreement, this reflection on the Irish use of concepts such as race, nation, and territory in Irish literature and cultural memory (evinced by Thomas Davis, Matthew Arnold, Yeats, and Pearse) remains topical. The sense of an Irish cultural ancestry remains an artistic and intellectual challenge, as it was for Yeats, and as such one can commit to it.

All Will Be Well is John McGahern's account of his life, from a grim childhood to the start of his career as a novelist with the publication of The Barracks (1963) and The Dark (1965), books that established him as one of Ireland's most impressive writers. He was born on November 12, 1934 in Dublin, the eldest child of a family that eventually came to seven children. He spent his early years in Ballinamore, County Leitrim. His mother was a teacher, employed when her health permitted in Aughawillian and other small, remote schools in Leitrim. She was an ardent believer in the Catholic faith that surrounded her. As McGahern recalls in All Will Be Well:

His mother's most intense hope for her son was that he would become a priest and that she would live to attend his first Mass. She died of cancer in 1945. McGahern's father, like my own, was a police sergeant. McGahern's was one of the first generation of policemen (the Garda Síochána) established by the Irish Free State in 1922.

Sometime in 1904 James Joyce, much given to drink and dissipation but not to violence, stumbled into a fracas in Dublin. Providentially he was rescued by a man named Alfred H. Hunter. Sobered up, Joyce conceived the notion of turning the episode into a short story and calling it “Ulysses.” It is not clear how the title would have suited the story or how the story might have been developed to answer the title. Homer's Odysseus was commonly thought of as a man of the world, a voyager, “the interminable adventurer,” as Wallace Stevens calls him in “The World as Meditation.” He was also admired as a man of parts, endlessly resourceful. But he was rarely identified with the Good Samaritan. Joyce intended to include the story in a book called Dubliners. He knew little about Hunter, except that he was reputed to be a Jew and to have an unfaithful wife. In the event, Joyce didn't write the story. On February 6, 1907 he told his brother Stanislaus that it “never got any forrader than the title.” But the matter didn't end there. Several years later and long after the publication of Dubliners, the unwritten story became chapter 16 (“Eumaeus”) of a long novel, Ulysses. In that chapter Leopold Bloom rescues Stephen Dedalus “in orthodox Samaritan fashion” from a bad night on the town and brings him to the cabman's shelter under the Loop Line Bridge, near Butt Bridge and the Custom House.

William Trevor is an Irish writer by birth, and I take it he considers himself an Irish writer still. He left Ireland in 1954 and has settled in Devon. He was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, on May 24, 1928 (but I have seen another birthday ascribed to him) to a family Protestant and middle-class. His father was a bank official with enough money to send him to school at Sandford Park, Dublin, and later to St. Columba's College, Rathfarnham, a school “with a reputation for aloofness, and skill on the hockey field.” At Trinity College, Dublin he read History but not with particular zeal. He left with an undistinguished degree and eventually found a reliable job in an advertising agency in London. In Excursions in the Real World (1994) he writes with equanimity of his early years:

A few autobiographical sentences may not, I hope, be amiss. I was born in Tullow, one of the minor towns of County Carlow, itself a minor county of the Irish Free State, as it was then constituted. But my home – though I rarely felt at home there – was in Warrenpoint, a town only slightly larger than Tullow, in County Down, just across the Border in Northern Ireland. My father was the sergeant-in-charge of the local police force, then called the Royal Ulster Constabulary. We were a Catholic family, living in the “married quarters” of the police barracks, not a comfortable situation in domestic, social, or political terms. My impulses were entirely nationalist, and I regarded the RUC as an alien instrument of occupation: its function was to enforce the status of Northern Ireland, a political entity I deplored. Whatever misgivings my father and mother felt on this issue, they did not discuss them in my presence. Religion and politics were beyond the pale of conversation.

Warrenpoint is a seaside resort on Carlingford Lough, but it is also distinctive for having the largest public square in Ireland. For that reason, when I was growing up, it was famous for political marches, Unionist flourishes, nationalist shows of resentment. Those occasions were equal in one respect, though not ecumenical in any: each party had two days in the year to itself.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize in 1993. Set on the north side of Dublin in 1966, it is the story of a ten-year-old boy, Paddy Clarke, told entirely in his voice. The events he speaks of are external. He doesn't keep a diary or express feelings as they occur to him. Everything in the book has happened in school or at home, on the streets of “Barrytown” or in the fields near the Clarkes' house. Paddy tells of these episodes shortly after they have happened, with a few references to earlier ones. Mainly he reports his daily life, ordinary things. We soon come to know him through his care for father and mother, his cruelty toward his young brother Francis (“Sinbad”), bouts of mischief-making for the thrill of it, petty thefts from local shops, spurts of vandalism, soccer on the street, games, fights. We also come to sense his resilience, the freshness of his small life, the unabashed timbre of his voice. Mostly his story amounts to loss. He wants to stop his father from fighting with his mother. He tries to anticipate his father's bad moods and to divert them by telling him a story or a joke. But it is no good. In the end, his father leaves home.

On October 28, 1726, the London printer Benjamin Motte issued the first volume of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, “first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships.” A few readers knew that the real author was Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral – “the cathedral close” – in Dublin. Presumably they took the book as a squib thrown off from the Dean's official life, or a satire on those in power in London who had banished him to Dublin in 1714. The book was an immediate success: two further editions were required in 1726 and two more in 1727. John Gay wrote to Swift on November 17, 1726 to report that “from the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the cabinet-council to the nursery.”

On April 2, 1916 one of Yeats's plays for dancers, At the Hawk's Well, received its first performance in Lady Emerald Cunard's drawing-room in Cavendish Square, London before an invited audience. Michio Ito danced the Guardian of the Well. The guests included Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. For all I know, this may have been the only afternoon on which Yeats, Eliot, and Pound were together in the same room. Many years later, Samuel Beckett wrote a play, like At the Hawk's Well, about waiting; waiting for someone who is supposed to arrive but doesn't, a variant of waiting for a transforming flow of water which is never received because the guardian of the well distracts those who are longing for it. In Happy Days Winnie utters the first line of At the Hawk's Well, “I call to the eye of the mind,” one of many literary allusions that she recalls – or rather, that Beckett recalls on her behalf. I draw a loose connection between these occasions to suggest a literary context for the relations I propose to describe: Yeats and Eliot, Yeats and Pound.

We know when Eliot converted to the Anglican Communion – he made his formal profession on June 9, 1927 – but we don't know precisely when he converted to Yeats: that took much longer. The first time he wrote formally about Yeats was in the Athenaeum, the issue for July 4, 1919, a memorably severe review of the reprinted The Cutting of an Agate.

On February 15, 1902 James Joyce, aged twenty, read a paper on James Clarence Mangan to the Literary and Historical Society of what is now University College, Dublin. It was a brash performance. Joyce spoke as if he were introducing an unknown poet, and chose to ignore the fact that there were several collections of Mangan's poems at large and that writers as various as John Mitchel, Charles Gavan Duffy, D. J. O'Donoghue, Father Charles Meehan, Louise Imogen Guiney, Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, and W. B. Yeats had written of his life and work. “Mangan has been a stranger in his country,” Joyce claimed, “a rare and unsympathetic figure in the streets, where he is seen going forward alone like one who does penance for some ancient sin.” Evidently more interested in Mangan's temperament than in his poems and essays, Joyce spoke of his reserve: “This purely defensive reserve is not without dangers for him, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference.” Reaching for a comparison, Joyce recalled the passage, already famous, in which Walter Pater completed his “imaginary portrait” of Watteau:

My first job was as an Administrative Officer in the Irish Civil Service. I was assigned to the Department of Finance, Establishments Division. Our duty was to decide on the staffing arrangements in various government departments and their outlying services. The work was not trivial. How many air traffic controllers should be employed at Shannon Airport? That was a question for the Department of Industry and Commerce, in the first instance, and for the Department of Finance – in principle, the Minister of Finance – in the end. I found nothing wrong with the work, except that I had no particular flair for it, as my superiors Seán Ó Buachalla, Gerard McInerney, and Louis Fitzgerald had. It was a happy release, then, when Professor Jeremiah J. Hogan offered me an Assistant Lectureship in the Department of English, University College, Dublin. Hogan was the sole professor: he was in full charge of the Department, in accordance with the ordinance of Departments by the Irish Universities Act of 1908. Informally, he entrusted the teaching of Old and Middle English to T. P. Dunning, a scholar of Langland. He handed over Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, as it was called, to Roger McHugh, a colleague he did not like: he wanted to keep him at a distance. English literature, from approximately the year 1500 to the later years of the nineteenth century – say, from Skelton to Newman and Hopkins – was Hogan's particular concern. American literature was not taught.

The word “Shakespeare” does not appear in any of Yeats's poems or plays, but “Shakespearean” does, in “Three Movements,” a poem included in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). It consists of three lines:

Most readers probably find the poem obscure; they wonder what “Shakespearean” means, and what “Romantic” means and what “those fish” denote in the allegory, if the poem is an allegory. They want to have these obscurities clarified, if only for the satisfaction of moving on to the next poem in the Collected Poems. Presumably there are readers who don't find the obscurity a nuisance; they appreciate it as an extreme form of discretion on Yeats's part. They may happen to know that Elizabethan rhetoricians had four words for this figure, they called it aenigma, noema, syllogismus, or intimatio. In Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery Rosemond Tuve explains that there were several ways of “beautifying the subject,” one of which was precisely by withholding ornamentation from it. By happy choice she quotes “Three Movements” to illustrate Yeats's use of enigma, though few readers would now recognize that this is what he is doing:

One afternoon in May 1911 Yeats, visiting his friend and former lover Olivia Shakespear in London, was introduced to an English girl named Bertha Georgiana Hyde-Lees. He was nearly forty-six years old, “George,” as her friends called her, was a few months over eighteen. A friendship soon developed, enthusiastic on her part, warier on his. They had much in common, including an interest in esoteric philosophy, astrology, the Tarot, and magic. They started attending séances together. In 1914 George was admitted, with Yeats as sponsor, to the Stella Matutina Section of the Golden Dawn, a secret society in London devoted to occult science and magic. By November 1915 the question of marriage had arisen, but there were difficulties. Yeats was still enchanted with Maud Gonne, although she had desecrated their love in 1903 by marrying Major John MacBride:

Maud's marriage ended in 1905, and a legal separation was effected the following year, but her Catholicism made it impossible for her to think of marrying again. Besides, she didn't want to marry Yeats. They had first met on January 30, 1889, and he had fallen in love with her. But Maud was politically and soon to be sexually involved with Lucien Millevoye, a Boulangist campaigner.