Connect: The 44th Yeats Summer School is ongoing in Sligo. Of all Irish writers, WBY, his image eternally frozen in cape and pince-nez, seems the ultimate literary man. Perhaps Oscar Wilde is recalled as more flamboyantly chi-chi but there was a showman's theatricality about Wilde's rig-outs and mannerisms.
Yeats seemed more solemn and earnest about literature. After all, for him, it was a form of religion. Consequently, it can be disconcerting to think of the great poet as a journalist even though journalism accounts for around half his published output. In all, WBY's recovered journalism is equivalent in volume to four or five average-size (typical Booker-length) literary novels.
Between 1886, when he was 21, and 1938, when he was 73, Yeats wrote almost 250 pieces of journalism for roughly 70 publications. Many of his articles were, of course, single contributions or part of batches of just two or three. In fact, more than 40 per cent of his journalism was written for just five publications.
His most frequent contributions were to the London-based Bookman, a literary magazine. His other most regular outlets were United Ireland, the feisty, nationalist Parnell paper; the (Dublin) Daily Express, the most unionist of Dublin's dailies; the (Boston) Pilot, staunchly Catholic and edited by the Fenian, John Boyle O'Reilly, and the United Irishman, Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin paper.
Yeats also wrote for newspapers and magazines which are still with us: The Irish Times, the Observer, the Times; and some which are gone: the Dublin Evening Mail, the Listener and the Irish Statesman among others. He also, of course, edited and wrote for the Irish literary theatre journals, Beltaine and Samhain.
His journalism début was in the Irish Fireside, a supplement of the Weekly Freeman. Four of his first five published pieces were for it. So Yeats, like James Joyce, who was published in the Irish Homestead, George Russell's journal for the Irish Agriculture Organisation Society, began his prose writing career in a modest publication.
The most prolific period of Yeats's journalism was in the 19th century. In the 14 years up until 1900, he produced more than he did in his 38 years in the 20th. His first 10 years in journalism - his 20s - were the busiest of all, although there was little let-up throughout his 30s. By the age of 40, he had produced almost 80 per cent of his total.
"My life," he wrote in a letter of June 1888, "is altogether ink and paper . . . I have written lately everything with a practical intention, nothing for the mere pleasure of writing, not a single scrap of a poem all these months." His "ink and paper" life, with its practical intentions, shows his early commitment to journalism, despite his father's trenchant objections.
Indeed, it was his substitute father, John O'Leary, who had been jailed and exiled for his writings in the Fenian newspaper, the Irish People, who eased WBY into journalism. Although Yeats hated the modern world and its machinery, he understood that getting his handwritten prose reproduced by the hot-metal typefaces of the press was his age's most potent means for branding lasting impressions on the "soft wax" that was his abiding image of Revival Ireland.
He knew that by the 1880s journalism was a daily and relentless shaper of consciousness. This was acutely so in Ireland, where the later decades of the 19th century saw the development of a revitalised urban-based press as well as a dynamic provincial one.
Mind you, Yeats was not particularly fond of journalists.
"I hate journalists," he wrote to Katherine Tynan. "There is nothing in them but tittering, jeering emptiness . . . especially the successful ones." Nonetheless he understood journalism's power. "If we are ever to have an Irish reading public we must have a criticism to tell it what to read and what to avoid. \ is not a matter for the authors, but for the journalists, editors and newspaper owners of Ireland," he wrote in an 1894 letter to United Ireland.
WBY used journalism to make himself and his work known, to create an audience for the literature he envisaged and to found a movement. In short, he used it, as he sometimes used poetry and drama, to propagandise. Most of his journalism is forgotten now, except by scholars and specialists. By ignoring (or repressing?) it in his memoirs, Yeats is partly responsible for this.
Yet his letters abound with references to journalism - his own and that of others. Such references - at times, practically obsessive - reveal him as excited, anxious and scheming about, as well as praising and condemning of, the press. It's clear he held charged views on the subject. Though shy and introverted, Yeats sometimes thundered in print and could be belligerent.
Anyway, as the summer school continues, it is intriguing to ponder what Yeats might make of Irish journalism in 2003. On this day when the wedding of a Taoiseach's daughter to a boyband member is the focus of so much press attention, might he again detect tittering, jeering emptiness? Perhaps, in journalism, little has changed despite so much appearing to have changed utterly.