The Politics of Neoclassicism in Belfast and Dublin

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the divergent histories and symbolic associations of the neoclassical Stormont and General Post Office buildings, in Belfast and Dublin respectively. Completed in 1932, the Northern Irish Parliament buildings at Stormont were constructed as a bastion of unionism, designed according to the imperial neoclassical vision of Sir Arnold Thornely, but influenced by the idiosyncratic ideas of Sir James Craig, who is also buried on site in a manner analogous to classicizing hero cult. The General Post Office in Dublin, by contrast, although a colonial building in its 1818 origin, has become one of the most iconic representations of Irish independence as the headquarters of the 1916 Rising. Despite being bombed by British forces during the Rising, it has since been restored and divested of its colonial symbolism.

Yeats and Oedipus

This chapter discusses how reception of Sophocles enabled W. B. Yeats to address domestic political tensions and negotiate his position in Irish nationalism in the context of British and subsequent Catholic censorship, and later to locate Ireland in the years between the two world wars within his vision of a universal cycle. A production of Oedipus the King at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution in the US, inspired Yeats to produce his own version of the play, for which he closely consulted the edition of distinguished classicist Richard Claverhouse Jebb, who was of Irish descent. Yeats continued to be inspired by Sophocles and by Greek philosophy as he worked on A Vision. His thoughts on cyclical transformations reflect a classically informed system of gyres which he saw instantiated in the end of the classical era, the death of Christ, and the violent upheavals of his own times.

Dinneen’s Irish Virgil

This chapter discusses the cultural and political reception of Virgil by the nationalist scholar, cleric, and Irish-language expert Patrick Dinneen. Dinneen forges connections between classical antiquity and the Irish experience, seeing himself as a latter-day Virgil, similarly dispossessed of his lands but engaged in the production of a national literature. Among his domesticating receptions of Virgil to the Irish context, he read the Georgics as a model for calling a people back to the land after civil strife. In Dinneen’s reading of Aeneid 6 as recommending a benign form of empire, however, the chapter pinpoints a tension between his favourable view of the Roman Empire as spreading civilization and Christianity, on the one hand, and the potential of empire for injustice and oppression, on the other.

Translating into Irish from Greek and Latin in the Early Years of the Irish State

This chapter charts the Irish translations of Greek and Latin texts and textbooks under the auspices of the Irish publishing house An Gúm in the early years of the Irish state. The language politics of nativists vs. progressives played into the place of translation in the scheme. The chapter includes detailed discussion of the work of Pádraig de Brún and George Thomson, progressives who favoured translations of classical texts into Irish. Daniel Corkery, on the other hand, a fervent nativist and critic of the work of de Brún, engaged in a bitter public debate on the issue which impacted negatively on the progressive endeavour to bring classical texts to an Irish-speaking audience. The chapter also gives briefer consideration to the work of other Irish translators: Margaret Heavey, Cormac Ó Cadhlaigh, Maoghnas Ó Domhnaill, Domhnall Ó Mathghamhna, Patrick Dinneen, and Peadar Ua Laoghaire.

Classics in the Van of the Irish Revolt

This chapter provides an assessment of the classically inflected literary output of Thomas MacDonagh, demonstrating how it generates a tension with the contemporary nativist movement with which MacDonagh also sympathized. The romanticization of the rebel leaders of the 1916 Rising as poets and intellectuals is discussed in the context of their engagement with classical models, and it is suggested that the nationalist narrative of opposition to classical literature in favour of Celtic heritage has obscured the more nuanced reality of figures like MacDonagh who were open to a wider range of cultural influences. The poetry of Catullus, translated by MacDonagh in both published and archival documents, illustrates how classical models enabled him to find a consonance between past and present.

Greece, Rome, and the Revolutionaries of 1916

This chapter argues for a tension in the writings of Patrick Pearse, with some discussion also of Thomas MacDonagh, between commitment to the Gaelic and Catholic movement, which had eclipsed the classicism of earlier political rhetoric, and a marked interest in classical culture. Following an overview of the reception of classical rhetoric in political oratory before Irish independence, Pearse’s essays and speeches are analysed and shown to be permeated with classical tropes. Pearse’s oration for O’Donovan Rossa is discussed in particular detail, and it is suggested that the affinities with Thucydides in this funeral oration may have been mediated by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, with which Pearse was familiar.

The Use and Abuse of Classics

This chapter offers a broad-ranging discussion of the ways in which Classics could be viewed as both imperialist and anti-imperialist: so T. S. Eliot saw Britain as heir to the Roman Empire, while James Joyce’s Ulysses uses the classics disruptively. At various times the putative coordination of the Latin language with an imperial mentality was deconstructed. The use of Latin in Ireland after the Penal Laws against Catholics could be read as a challenge to the imperial Latin of the British. Later the disparaging attitude towards the Irish language by classicist J. P. Mahaffy and philologist Robert Atkinson collided with the Irish language revival, the supporters of which (e.g. Daniel Corkery) objected to classical languages, yet were paradoxically comparable to Eliot in fetishizing tradition. An alternative view is pointed out by Howard Brenton in The Romans in Britain (1981), which shows the British and the Irish to have common Celtic roots.

The Classical Themes of Irish Coinage, 1928–2002

This chapter traces the conceptualization and subsequent legacy, through the lens of social biography, of the classically inspired Irish coinage of the new independent Irish state. Under the direction of W. B. Yeats as Chairman of the Coinage Committee, seven artists were invited to submit designs adhering to the guidelines and suggestions of the committee, including photographs of classical coinage depicting animals. Percy Metcalfe won the commission with a design for a new coinage that was radical in omitting any figurehead, and thus also unlike the former British currency. After receiving critical international acclaim, the coins had a significant impact both in inspiring other currencies globally and in being affectionately memorialized in Ireland, after the introduction of the euro, through the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the sculpture of Carolyn Mullholland.

Elegies for Ireland

This chapter investigates the reception of Roman elegy in the work of W. B. Yeats and Michael Longley, a continuum that brings to light both the constant presence and changing shape of classical reception in the century since the 1916 Rising. Ezra Pound’s anti-imperialist reading of Propertius mediates this reception for the Irish poets, but whereas Yeats takes a similarly partisan and anti-imperial line, albeit blended with his personal affairs, Longley’s approach is more ecumenical, albeit interwoven with the Troubles of his native Northern Ireland. As a genre born in civil war, but which views the world through an erotic lens, elegy is found to give Longley the lyrical form for his anti-war appropriation of epic. His versions of Tibullus and Sulpicia also expose cycles of brutality and the imbrication of public and domestic violence. Longley thus offers a more pacific model of the elegiac woman than Yeats’s revolutionary muse.

Irish Didos

This chapter examines the Irish interrogation of empire through various receptions of Dido, queen of Carthage, tracing a continuum from the popular ballads of the 1700s to Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians. The ballad tradition, with a fluid system of referencing unfettered by scholarly or literary norms, challenged more elite literary identifications of Ireland as Carthage by linking the Irish not with the Carthaginians, but with Roman generals. Just as Dido features in these ballads in roles unrelated to Aeneas, so also McGuinness’s Dido as a gay Northern Irish young man is a fluid and independent character. Set in the context of the Northern Irish conflict, McGuinness’s play reclaims high culture for the working class, whose representatives show how in refusing imperial models a means of survival can be found.