Slow folk at work! Literary appropriations of local materials by Irish, Spanish and Bulgarian modernists

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Content SLOW
FOLK
AT WORK!
LITERARY APPROPRIATIONS OF LOCAL MATERIALS BY IRISH, SPANISH
AND BULGARIAN MODERNISTS

by

Plamen Ivanov Gaptov

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

December 2009

Copyright 2009 Plamen Ivanov Gaptov
ii
Dedication
For Dyado Petar who taught me how to play backgammon

iii
Acknowledgements
The course of dissertations never did run smooth. I needed the help of an international
motley crew to make this study happen. In many ways, then, it is – like much of literary
modernism – a group project. In the first instance, I would like to thank my distinguished
committee for their kind guidance, probing questions, advice, encouragement and
understanding. Without them, this dissertation would not be what it is. Two seminars at
the University of Southern California have been especially instructive as well as
inspirational: I owe an intellectual debt to Dr. Karen Pinkus and Dr. Daniel Tiffany. Their
seminars on sound and vernacular poetry, respectively, have instigated much of the
pabulum which has nourished the initial conception of this project.
I had a lot of help in Bulgaria: from my mom and nephew (two of my main informants),
my grandma Maria (who also served as an informant about the old rural ways of keeping
the folkloric tradition alive), my dad (who is an excellent chauffeur), my sister (my right
hand and devoted research assistant), Marcho Nikolov (technical support), the librarians
in Sofia and Burgas who had to run up and down reading rooms to provide me with
materials, the cabdriver Zhoro who got involved with advice on how to find rare audio
materials, Dimitar Valchanov who kept me on track.
On this side of the Atlantic, I was lucky to have known Misha Mazor in New York
(geek support and companion in my field work), Sarah Baird in Charleston (who gave me
important research advice), Vinu Krishnan in Florida (who offered me excellent Indian
food and a comfortable couch), Alphonso Brown (who was my main Gullah informant).
iv
My thanks to Adam del Monte for being an inspiration and for sharing ideas about his
own work with flamenco and to Ivelina Katalieva for forwarding, however grudgingly,
important knowledge about the experience of being a performing musician. Many thanks
to Roshni Toorkey-Cincoreimas who sat with me and spoke verses to musical notes.
Together, we discovered how difficult it is to revive old traditions.
Finally, I would like to thank the Doheny Library (for scanning numerous articles and
locating books at the click of a mouse) and all the copyists and librarians in photocopy
shops and libraries in Burgas, Sofia, Los Angeles, and other places.

v
Table of Contents
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vii
Introduction: Folklore and Modernist Poetry at the Limits of Europe 1
First principles 7
“Sung”poetry : gymnophonetics and folk grammar 18
Who are the folk after all? 24
Nationalism’s use of folklore 45
Accelerated development of culture 65
Folklore and Literature 72
Folklore in literature 85
Folkloristics and the study of literature 92

Chapter 1: Dialectism 100
Standard, Non-standard, Sub-standard 104
Modernist Dialectism 110
Literary Language as Inter-language 115
Translational Aesthetics 143
Dialects of Paradise 161
Tongues of the Common Folk 168
Dialect as Folklore 195

Chapter 2: Poetic Folklorism. Yeats’s Act 198
The craft of verse 215
Speaking to the psaltery 222
The method 227
Quarrelsome domain: Yeats among modern musicians 259
Modernist Balladry 266

Chapter 3: Vernacularism 283
“Popularismo”: Federico García Lorca and vernacular aesthetics 288
The Lectures: Folklore as Aesthetic Theory 298
A) Lorca’s discovery of the hidden treasure of folklore 299
B) The theory of the duende as vernacular theodicy 306
Flamenco Ole! 308
Lorca’s Poetic Juerga 314
Geo Milev and vernacular expression 335
Articles of poetic faith 339
There’s only one – the people 346
vi
The vernacular logic of inverted syntax 348
The Edenic plural anon 350
The sound of it 352
The chanting tradition as collective memory 353
Space and the collective memory of the chant 358
Naming in the chanting tradition 359
‘September’: an audio-print experiment 361

Coda 386

Bibliography 389

vii
Abstract
Folklore plays a crucial role in the construction of modernist poetry. Especially in a
conflict or post-conflict social context, literatures seeking to renew themselves often turn
for inspiration to local traditions which they seek to appropriate. When literary criticism
studies the link between folklore and literature, it usually does that from a thematic point
of view, laying the stress almost exclusively on themes and folkloric motifs. Rarely is the
sound of folklore emphasized as a formative influence on modernist poetry. Lying
somewhere among the fields of linguistics, folkloristics, ethnomusicology, and literary
studies, the present project aims to trace very specifically and directly the crucial
influence of local traditions on four modernists.
Chapter one (‘Dialectism’) examines the ways in which modernists forge an “original”
language using folk speech. I examine the hybrid English of J. M. Synge via the prism of
second language acquisition, particularly the concept of inter-language. Chapter two
(‘Poetic Folklorism’) studies Yeats’s theories of performance, particularly his theories
regarding the speaking of poetry and drama, and their indebtedness to folklore. I look at
several examples of the ‘more practical side’ of his work. The centerpiece of the chapter
is Yeats’s collaboration with Florence Farr in the speaking of verse to musical notes.
Chapter three (‘Vernacularism’) mixes the football chant – a vernacular poetic genre as
well as an example of urban folklore – with Geo Milev’s poem ‘September’. It is an
audio-print experiment in sounding expressionist poetry. I also examine García Lorca’s
“flamenco” poetry, his aesthetic theories and their debt to a vernacular vision. I have
viii
presented excerpted audio examples as well as a modicum of original work in the CD
accompanying the dissertation.
1
Introduction: Folklore and Modernist Poetry at the Limits of Europe

First principles
“Sung” poetry: gymnophonetics and folk grammar
Who are the folk after all?
Nationalism’s use of folklore
Accelerated development of culture
Folklore and Literature
Folklore in literature
Folkloristics and the study of literature

To my knowledge, no claim has been made about the decisive influence of folklore on
modernist literature. This study aims to fill the gap. Stephen Benson recognizes the
lacuna when it comes to European and American literature written in ‘the past 50 years.’
1

As far as modernism goes, he agrees that to claim an importance of folklore for European
literary modernism – except perhaps in the case of Yeats – would be untenable. Lacking
general models for the study of the link between 20th century literature and folklore,
Benson takes music as a model. In some ways, it is understandable that music should
have attracted more attention than literature has done when it comes to the connection
between high art and folklore. It is a more universal language – a tune travels easier than
a poem written in a “minor” language. For this reason, there are many who have heard of
Bartók but not of Petöffy.
The importance of folk materials for modernist aesthetics should not be reduced to
studies of individual authors such as Yeats. Even in the case of Yeats, the progress of
Yeats studies was slow in catching up with this crucial aspect of his poetry. Mary

1
Benson, Stephen, Cycles of Influence. Fiction, folktale, theory, Wayne State University Press: Detroit,
2003, p. 1.
2
Thuente’s informative study blazed a trail which had been as yet unexplored.
2
But
folklore’s decisive importance for modernist literature goes far deeper and wider than the
work of individual authors. Yet its influence on modernism has remained understudied.
This may partly be due to the fact that folklore is a hidden wonder with a simple façade.
It is simply too difficult and time-consuming – not to mention the additional expertise
needed to study its specific technicalities – to repay the effort. But authors such as Yeats
and Synge from Ireland, Lorca and others from Spain, Geo Milev and a whole slew of
confirmed avantgardist modernists from Bulgaria, prove the point that folklore was
important not simply as a theme or motif in an individual work but as a driving
mechanism of both the culture in question and of modernist experimentation in particular.
Another difficulty might be the need to define two areas which seem to be so at odds
with each other. On the upper side of the pyramid stands modernist artistic
experimentation, on the lower side is the putative simplicity and conservatism of the
folkloric tradition. But it is precisely as a possible consequence of the linkage between
modernism and folklore that modernism itself begins to be re-defined. As with any other
“ism”, the more instantiations of it one gathers, the more complete is its conceptual
profile.
This, apart from the link to folklore, explains the strange-looking constellation of
authors examined in the present study. The first line drawn here connects two Irish
authors. At this point, the geography of literary folklorism is not untypical for criticism
(particularly in post-colonial studies or in individual works concerned with the link

2
Thuente, Mary Helen, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, Gill and Macmillan, Barnes & Noble Books,
Totowa: New Jersey, 1980.
3
between literature and anthropology or ethnography) whose focus is literary production
in the English language. Later, the trajectory extends from Ireland to Spain only to end in
Eastern Europe. At the limits of Europe – at least – folklore seems to be crucial for the
formation of both popular literature and of poetic works one is accustomed to see in
discussions of literary modernism. But I want to make a stronger claim: viz. that it would
be impossible to study modernism in these cultures and at the same time ignore the folk
connection.
But what is the influence of folklore on literature? Benson assumes too readily,
together with most literary scholars, that folklore ‘becomes incorporated into literature’.
The question then (and it is rare when a literary scholar goes even this far) becomes:
‘how do we deal with the intersection, with this interactional dynamic?’ Benson’s
answers are simple: the so-called ‘modes by which writers incorporate folklore’ include
the mimetic, the referential and the like. But modernist writers’ appropriations of folklore
certainly deserve a more sophisticated attention whereby one is able to avoid ending up
with statements like: ‘Folklore is “in” literature, then, because art imitates life in a variety
of ways, both obvious and subtle.’ To add insult to injury, ‘[i]n many instances … a
writer takes the folklore at face value, accepting its existence in the real world and, in
imaginatively moving it to a fictional one, re-situates and validates its communicative
relevance in a mimetic exposition of its power.’
3
As I will show a little later, this is what
nationalist ideology does with folklore, i.e. it imitates its power. Modernists, on the other
hand, do not take folklore at face value but update its currency. They do that precisely

3
Cycles of Influence, pp 12, 10, 14, 23.
4
because they are aware of the currency’s existence in real life. Awareness of the life-
cycles of folklore allows the modernist to re-evaluate it by factoring in a kind of inflation
quotient. There is a grain of truth of Benson’s statement, however. As chapter three will
attempt to show, a modernist poet may opt to imitate the power of folklore, as it were,
naïvely. If folklore is found in nature, and if the naïve treatment (as in Schiller’s
discussion of the naïve and sentimental) of nature/folklore imitates its power, then we
could be talking about something like Benson’s mimesis.
When working with folkloric items, one finds the need to tap into the history of the use
of folk materials for ideological purposes. Like banknotes, folkloric materials cannot be
taken at face value without awareness of the history/evolution/devolution/devaluation of
folk-use. Few works on the give-and-take between folklore and literature explain this
dimension; in some it is implicit, others mention it, still others take it for granted or
assume that it is a different concern, more or less unrelated to the ask at hand (which
usually boils down to tracing folklore’s place in literature by studying themes and motifs).
The use of folklore for ideological purposes has received a lot of attention in histories of
(cultural) nationalism, but there, very little is said about the intrinsic merits of folklore,
let alone about its value as a rich source for literary appropriation. Some studies by
literary scholars emphasize the link between (cultural) nationalism and literature but
rarely with any detailed analysis of what folklore actually is.
4
The role of folklore is seen
as crucial to the construction of national identity but little, other than a brief mention, is

4
E.g. Rob Doggett’s Deep-Rooted Things. Empire and Nation in the Poetry and Drama of William Butler
Yeats, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, Indiana, 2006.

5
said about actual folk forms. A later section of this introduction attempts to relate the
three fields which are rarely brought together: folklore, nationalist ideology, and
literature.
5
I bring up this interdisciplinary overlap not because it is the focus of my study.
My central interest is performance and sound – but it often becomes very difficult to hear
the sound of folklore precisely because its use and abuse by nationalist ideology occludes
its unique character. In many ways, this abuse has become part of the very etymology of
the word folklore. Nationalism seems to have forever cast its etymological shadow over
folklore. My claim is that the presence of folklore should not be reduced to discussions of
cultural nationalism. Rather, the haunting presence of folklore – what I will later song –
requires some acquaintance with the specifics of folk forms. In that sense, to appropriate
folklore is not simply to re-situate it within a literary work, but to perform it with the
seriousness and virtuosity of a folk performer aware of the reality of the burden of the
folklore tradition.
***
What, then, of Irish, Spanish and Bulgarian poetic folklorisms? The three stories are
unique and therefore irreducible both to a generic conception of folklorism and to one
another. Yet, all three cultures, in very similar ways, serve as a complex backdrop for the
study of literary modernism on the margins of Europe.
6
Several important points about

5
David Lloyd’s explorations which bring the three areas together are significant exceptions; see especially
his Nationalism and Minor Literature (1987) and Anomalous States (1993).

6
Ireland was fighting to gain its independence; Bulgaria had just shed the 500-year-long colonial yoke;
Spain had just experienced the final spasms of its demise as an empire. Thus, all three contexts can be
designated as post-colonial. Additionally, in all cases, we are dealing with cultures which posit the question
about the limits of Europe. In the case of Spain, it was Andalusian (Gypsy) culture which paradoxically
placed Spanish modernism on the European map. In Ireland, it was the marginalized culture of the peasant
6
modernist appropriation of folklore and about modernism in general emerge in all three
cases. These will be the main tenets of the present project: a) literary modernism is often
a dynamic game of cultural leapfrog, a progressive look backward as well as a
mechanism of accelerating culture; b) the ways in which folklore inhabits a literary work
need not be reduced to the presence of themes, characters, motifs, or narrative structure; c)
far from being an exclusively individual phenomenon, modernism has a significant
collective aspect which is different from the cliquish participation in a movement or
“ism” such as vorticism, imagism, etc.; d) modernist poesis could be read as a folkloric
enactment, while a poet’s task may be considered similar to that of the folk performer; e)
a significant trace of the relation between folklore and poetry is present in the poem in the
form of what we may call songfulness – this is the acoustic/sonic dimension of poetry.
I will end this preliminary section with a definition of the term folklore. In this study, I
follow the established definition of folklore which has gained currency within the area
folkloristics over the past three decades. Since 1977, the year which has proved fateful
for folkloristics as a discipline, folklore has become a much enlarged term which includes
things like playground chants, counting and all sorts of other verbal games, games of
many different kinds, gestures, foodways, occupational folklore, family folklore, and
many other forms and types. The definition of the “folk” has also expanded considerably.
The “folk” is ‘any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common linking

that was the center of the Irish literary renaissance. As for Bulgarian modernism, it was a strange hybrid,
combining the foreign and the local/ traditional, that allowed Bulgarian literary innovation to enter the
larger family of European modernisms.
7
factor.’
7
Local traditions of any kind (whether rural or urban, street or fireside) all belong
in this extended definition of a ‘linking factor’. Nor is longevity a factor any more, i.e. a
tradition need not be centuries old in order to be considered folklore. Folklore’s lifecycles
can now be shorter than a generation.
First principles
"one's own"
Viewed as a collective project, modernism begins to disengage itself from its customary
association with the notion of the author as a single all-important creative center. A kind
of group effort, this type of modernism is consciously envisioned by its author as playing
a potential and sometimes actual part in a wider (for instance a folkloric) tradition. The
notions of mastery, of individual authorial presence, of a highly personal, distinctive
signature, etc., begin to lose their pre-eminence without ceasing to be important. This
paradox has wide-ranging implications. It is customary, for instance, to look for an
author’s signature in a modernist work. If there is a question about modernist literature
which can be considered settled, it is the question of the modernist’s distinctive
voice/style/signature. And yet, the poetic/dramatic projects studied here seem to preclude
such easy assumptions. Who is speaking – the ‘I’ or the many? Whose voice is
empowered to speak and where does this voice imagine to be gaining its legitimacy? In
what sense can we say that modernists borrow the voice/style/signature of the folkloric
tradition and make it their own?

7
See International Folkloristics. Classic Contributions by the Founders of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes,
Rowman & Littlefield: Lahnam, Maryland, 1999, p. vii.

8
The question of voice ownership becomes even less easy to answer in a cultural
situation where modernism coincides with a nation’s efforts to rebuild itself. Authorial
energies are harnessed for the purposes of building national literatures as authors attempt
to become part of local traditions. In a post-colonial situation, for example, the nation
attempts to regroup and escape the shadow of the colonizer. Arising from the ashes of
cultural isolation (typical cases would be Bulgaria and Ireland), the nation looks outwards
with an almost necessary openness. In both cases, the attempt was to assume one’s
rightful place amidst European civilization – a right of which the colonized nation had
been deprived for centuries. Thus, cultural cosmopolitanism creates a vibrant scene
which is fully attuned to the latest fashions of Europe. In this game of catch-up,
translation of cultural practices plays a vital role. Foreign languages begin to assume the
cultural capital necessary for the participation in an elite. Literary exploits assume an
adventurous spirit. Grafting of foreign schools on the domestic arena creates a living
anthology of literary practices. Since this is all done in the context of accelerated
development of culture, a particularly exciting telescopy is the case. Sometimes this is
evident in the work of one single author. Whatever the actual “school”, movement or
faction, the important thing is that all energies work in a context of simultaneity as
various literary “isms” (which are usually drawn over a horizontal time-line) tumble over
one another with the aim of resolving the same big issue: how to move a nation’s culture
forward…This pell-mell literary context creates multiple foreign-own reverberations
from one work to another. The result is that the production of literature assumes a special
kind of urgency as each pen is still smarting from the most recent skirmish and has a
9
point to prove. The modernist smithy resounds with the noise of the trenches. No longer
hidden in a quiet lab, the modernist is on the frontline.
One of the fronts is that of the national tradition as it tries both to invade the hitherto
unattainable “foreign” and to prevent incursions into one’s own. All is not quiet on this
front. For one thing, embracing foreign cultures (in a kind of ready cosmopolitanism or
Europeanism) can seem like surrender to foreign influences just when the nation is
emerging from centuries of colonial oppression. To be a foreigner in one’s own country
could be a horrendous offense. The opposition between the foreign and one’s own is thus
both an author’s personal issue and a concern of the wider culture.
But the issue is even more complicated. As P. J. Matthews points out, the definition of
local culture is often unclear. Referring to Lady Gregory’s essay ‘Ireland, Real and Ideal’,
Mathews finds that the impetus of the Anglo-Irish literati ‘to win respect when they
appeared in their own form’ rather than in ‘the mask thrust upon them for too long’
resulted in ambiguity: ‘What exactly “our own form” should be was decidedly uncertain
as the nineteenth century drew to a close, due to the steady abandonment of Irish cultural
practices and the rapid assimilation of colonial cultural forms.’
8
Small wonder that, as
Yeats exclaims in Samhain, even ‘the most highly trained audiences’ which Dublin had

8
Matthews, P. J. Revival. The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and Co- operative Movement,
Critical Conditions: Field Day Monographs, University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day,
2003, p. 45.

10
produced ‘of late’ ‘drift between what is Irish and English in confused uncertainty, and
have not even begun the search for what is their own’.
9

The modernists studied here all borrowed from local culture – albeit in a way which
was their own.
“the choric”
Very closely related to the idea of ownership is the “choric” principle in modernist
poetics. This takes us to the notion of a collective voice. It is instantiated in the works of
the modernists studied here: in Lorca's vernacular aesthetics which accord a central role
to folkloric traditions; in the use of dialect by J. M. Synge; in the poetic voice of Geo
Milev’s ‘September’ which borrows, after a fashion, the voice of the people; in Yeats's
performative models where speakers are not merely exponents of his political or esoteric
views but are part of Irish folk traditions. The choric principle challenges the very idea of
the monolithic speaker in modernist poetry; one feels entitled to talk, rather, of a
disembodied presence, a depersonalized voice desiring a baptism in the local tradition.
In a related sense, the choric pertains to what Julia Kristeva calls the chora. This is the
semiotic dimension of language, the maternal substratum which always cuts through the
symbolic dimension. The semiotic is expressed in cries of emotion, in the cadences of
speech, in interjections, in the melody of poetic speech. The voice of the crowd,
borrowed by the modernist, lends a choric (in this sense of the word) quality to his or her
work. Kristeva is very much part of a tradition of philosophizing about language which

9
Yeats, W. B, Samhain, No. 7, p. 6 (in Samhain. October 1901 – November 1908. Numbers One to Seven
Reprinted in One Volume together with Paragraphs from the Unpublished Number of 1909, with an
introduction by B. C. Bloomfield, Frank Cass and Company Limited: London, 1970).

11
includes Ernst Cassirrer, Herder and Max Müller. These philosophers look for the
primitive beginnings of language. Kristeva calls this primitive origin the semiotic
dimension and finds its best instantiation in poetic language:
Consequently, one should begin by positing that there is within poetic language
(and therefore in a less pronounced manner, within any language) a
heterogenousness to meaning and signification. This heterogenousness, detected
genetically in the first echolalias of infants as rhythms and intonation anterior to
the fist phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, sentences; this heterogenousness,
which is later reactivated as rhythms, intonations, glossalalias in psychotic
discourse, serving as ultimate support of the speaking subject… this
heterogenousness to signification operates through, despite, and in excess of it
and produces in poetic language “musical” but also nonsense effects… We shall
call this disposition semiotic (le sémiotique)…
10

This disposition which houses the ‘indeterminate articulation’ before the advent of
signification is not thetic but pre-literary. The receptacle of this ‘unnamable, improbable’
‘hybrid’ is the chora.
11
To capture its essence, one cannot rely on themes and motifs
since it emerges as a surplus to thematics. Significantly, its heterogeneity subverts the
very notion of literary language and of literariness.
12

“the leap-frog”
In a game of leap-frog, all players except one are arranged in a line. Each of these
players assumes a position which allows the only player left standing to leap over him or
her. The standing player (the leaper) moves to the front of the line, goes a little distance
from the group and turns back to face the arched backs offered as so many spring-boards

10
Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez, transl.
by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez, Columbia University Press: New York, 1980, p. 133.

11
Ibid., p. 133.

12
See chapter one for a discussion of the ways in which Synge’s language subverts the idea of canonicity/
literariness.
12
on his/her way. The leaper starts his/her run. Once the first back is reached, the leaper
leans over, props him/herself with both hands and leaps off that back. Each successive
back is easier to leap over as the leaper uses the momentum gained over the course of
his/her run. The avant-gardist principle of turning one's back on one's immediate
predecessors often leads the modernist back to the very beginning of the chain of
tradition: ad fontem. Initially one is concerned with innovation (for instance, second- or
third-wave modernists in Bulgaria dissatisfied with the work of the generation
immediately preceding them). In cases where the leapfrogging gains exciting momentum,
one may reach as far back as the imagined origin of the tradition in question or even to a
more ancient (and in most cases) hypothetical origin. In this sense, modernism is what
Yeats called ‘dreaming back’. Paradoxically, the concern with the new forces modernists
to face the old, even the ancient. They go back in time – even to a space of nothingness –
before there was literature. In Bulgarian culture, this is the space of the folk song to
which modernists returned time and again. Some modernists returned a long way. For D.
H. Lawrence, for instance, the Greeks would not suffice – they too had to be leapt over.
The Etruscans exemplified better than the Greeks (to whom Nietzsche had dreamt back)
a truly naturally aesthetic race, before conquest destroyed the picturesque simplicity of
their art.
The return to lost origins, even more so than the return to previous stages of the literary
tradition (viewed by T.S. Eliot as extra-historical), is a modernist concern which
resembles in some key aspects the spirit of nineteenth-century etymology. This link has
hitherto been altogether neglected as modernism is usually seen as a sibling of
13
Saussurean linguistics. Nineteenth-century philology, with its often ludicrous derivations
and myth-making, is seen as clearly a thing of the past. In this way, literary criticism has
achieved what Finnegans Wake called the ‘abnihilization of the etym’. But in many ways,
the literary projects of modernist authors can be profitably studied by leaping over
Saussure for a moment. Modernism may be seen as a dreaming-back to lost origins, of
which the origin of language is one.
The notion of the leapfrog has its tempting – but ultimately unsatisfactory – double.
The leapfrog can often be misconstrued as a wide availability – on a synchronous plane –
of various stages of a tradition. Ronald Schleifer refers to Hugh Kenner’s dictum that
“Romanticism skipped Ireland”. What this amounts to is that Ireland ‘lost the nineteenth-
century historical sense’, the sense, in Kenner’s words, of ‘the sheer otherness of the
past.’ In Ireland, Schleifer argues, ‘the past is not other, neither continuous nor
discontinuous with the present; it is simply identical with it.’
13
This creates an extra-
historical sense of tradition which is co-present with contemporary literary efforts.
Regarding such a cultural context, it is tempting to imagine a synchronous plane of
literary echoes which, like a dictionary of folkloric motifs, treats the items found on its
co-instantaneous surface as part of one logical nexus where the origins of things are lost.
What matters is the motif in its participation in a web of relations with other such-like
items. On the face of it, this extra-historical plane could form a good context for the game
of leap-frog.

13
Schleifer, Ronald ed., The Genres of the Irish Literary Revival, Pilgrim Books, Inc., Norman, Oklahoma
and Wolfbound Press, Dublin, Ireland, 1980, p. 5.
14
Aside from the fact that Schleifer’s history-less cultural surface is remarkably
inapplicable to Ireland, such a synchronous plane of available pasts has one major
disadvantage as a theoretical model for the leapfrog in that it misses out on the leapfrog’s
most crucial aspect. This is its sheer motility, the momentum which the backward bounce
gathers, the intensification of the excitement of having arrived at an ever-receding point
from the starting point, the thirst for past-ness and lost-ness, and also the desire to reach
the final point where no one has yet leapfrogged. The leapfrogging player is about to go
farther and farther back in a line of arched backs. For a concentrated moment (the
moment when the player makes contact to lift him- or herself), the offered backs act as
spring-boards. Leaping on, the player sees the ultimate aim coming within view – the
final position of the chain of arched backs. The player approaches its triumphant
loneliness – until he/she too must arch a back and offer it as a springboard for some one
else.
“the clearing”
This is the space which the modernist stakes out for him- or herself based on his or her
excavation work among the folk. The journey in the thick forest of folklore leads to a
miraculous sighting of an unexplored, free space where the folk has made a camp hidden
from easy view. This is the space of folkloric enactments. In many cases, it is a magical
circle: the Bulgarian circle dance (horo) or the fire circle of the nestinarka (a dancer on
glowing coals); the circle of the flamenco juerga or of the Gullah “ring shout”; the ring-
shaped rath or fort which is always fairy-haunted. It is also any space, circular or not,
where folkloric enactments take place: e.g. the calypso ‘yard’ as well as the calypso ‘tent’;
15
an isolated cottage with its tell-tale fireside; a football ground with its long-lived tradition
of chanting; the prinkum (in Connaught) which is the soirée or hoolie in Ireland, which in
Bulgaria is the vecherinka (lit. ‘a little nighter’) and in Spain the velada; the sedyanka (in
Bulgarian villages; lit. ‘a sitting’) where the folks take turns to tell stories and sing songs.
More generally, this is the place inhabited by the folk: an island (e.g. the Aran Islands), a
small town or a larger geographical territory where traditions still live strong (e.g. the
town of Sligo, the Westernmost parts of Ireland, Andalusia in Spain, the Rhodope region
in Bulgaria). The modernist stumbles upon this clearing, and a new world is disclosed in
front of his/her gaze. To be part of the clearing is a privilege. In many cases, this
idealized space is a fantasy which serves as a model for poetic performance. Finally, the
clearing is a creative space (a niche carved out by the modernist), a fertile ground marked
by its difference from literary schools and fashions.
When a larger group of authors meet one another in the same clearing (Lady Gregory,
as the story goes, saw Synge in the distance when they were both doing fieldwork on the
Aran Islands), the new folksy movement begins to look like a phase within the larger
folkloric tradition. This phenomenon of the crowded clearing is particularly relevant to
literary movements/modernisms which share the communal goal of driving a nation’s
culture forward. Bulgarian poetic and musical modernisms, much like Irish literary
modernism, were communal projects of this type.
“song”
Song informs the very essence of poetry. This is a typical mantra repeated time and
again by nineteenth-century seekers of the lost origin of language. The music of speech
16
was a constant concern of the authors studied here. But this is not equivalent to the
musicalization of poetry (as in Verlaine’s dictum ‘Music above all’). More than simply a
carrier of vocality, song – as defined here – is responsible for what one may call the sung
aspect of modernist poetry. I take song to be a haunting presence in poetry. For my
purposes, it will also serve as the archetype of folklore. And since modernism sometimes
uses folklore as its model, it appears that song, and more specifically the folk song, may
be an archetype for modernism. This is a strange view, but (as the modernisms studied
here amply testify) not an unlikely one.
It is difficult to make claims about folklore because it comprises an endless array of
genres. Often, such claims are based on a narrow selection of examples and, for this
reason, simply cannot apply to all of folklore. One needs a short-hand term which both
captures folklore’s crucial qualities and serves as a more approachable reference point.
Depending on the qualities one wishes to stress, certain folk forms become more or less
appropriate. For the purposes of this study, the folk song will be considered the “ideal” of
folklore.
Song has a funny habit of persisting all the way from the bottom to the top levels on the
hierarchy of appropriation. Like a semiotic chora, it cuts through the symbolic discourses
– from antiquarianism with its folk song collections through poetic folklorism to the
scientific project of folkloristics – which echo the song. Sometimes, as in Yeats’s poetry,
the song is a haunting presence. Poetic projects (over and above individual poems) of this
sort make sure that song gets a new lease on life. From being a herbarium lying between
the pages of a field-trip book, the folkloric material gets picked up, re-collected, and ends
17
up playing a central role in poetic systems. Descending from on high, the judgment of the
professional folklorist (and of the critic of culture) sings its own version of the folk tune.
The poetics of scientific folklorism (and of cultural critique) often include a song of
lamentation – that folklore (and culture) is dying, that it needs to be saved. This lament of
the folklorist (critic of culture) appears with the perverse regularity of a folk motif across
widely different cultures. Sometimes, the folklorist sees the folksy poet as an impertinent
intruder. The poet – with his/her own hidden agenda – is seen as interfering with the
natural lifecycle of folklore. This allows the folklorist to take up the mournful song of the
loss of song.
Song is dialect in its sensuous sonority (the subject of chapter one); it is also an essence
inherent to speech (chapter two will attempt to tie the loose threads of Yeats and Florence
Farr’s ideas about the music of speech); it is also the sound of a musical tradition (e.g. the
flamenco tradition) with its haunting presence in the poetic work (this is the focus of the
Lorca section of chapter three); finally, it is the traditional singing voice of an imagined
speaker permeating a poem (the Geo Milev section of chapter three traces the presence of
the collective voice of the uprising folk through the prism of an urban folkloric tradition,
the football song).
Ultimately, song is an escape from the customary analysis of folkloric motifs in literary
works. The literary scholar often ends up entangled in an ideal of literariness which
involves an almost exclusive focus on themes – as if that is all folklore has to yield which
could be of interest to the literary analyst. As if literariness itself, which is customarily
thought of as residing in the written, cannot tolerate the hybridity of the spoken. But there
18
is a viable alternative to this exclusivist conception of the literary which, as I hope to
show, is to be found in the very sound of folklore. Even when the acoustic dimension is
invoked by literary criticism (as in, say, Ann Saddlemyer’s discussion of J. M. Synge’s
soundscapes), it is rarely more than a musical metaphor. Even when it is actual musical
principles which are invoked, it is quite customary to talk about symphonic mechanisms
underlying particular literary works, sonata structures, music as a motif, etc., – in other
words, it is classical music serving as analogy or as direct source. Rarely is folk song
discussed as a song, as sound. But the song-ness of song will sound if we could but sound
it.
“Sung” poetry: gymnophonetics and folk grammar
Song takes us directly to the sound of poetry. Here I will only give a small illustration of
one of the many ways in which the tradition of folk performance inhabits a poetic work.
Hristo Botev (1848 – 1876), the archetype of the poet-folklorist in the Bulgarian literary
canon, is not a modernist proper but his work with the Bulgarian folk song was both
influential and paradigmatic for subsequent episodes in the history of Bulgarian literature.
It would stand on its own right even if it was not crucial for later authors (including Geo
Milev) as his poetic effort to sound and perform the voice of the folk song remains
unsurpassed. Known for his habit of reciting variants of his poems long before their
publication, Botev naturally gained preeminence in the folkloric chain of transmission.
His poetic gems quickly became songs in the hands of the people before they reached the
printed page where they merely look like great literature. The following strophe (Strophe
1) performs what it describes:
19
Nastáne vécher, mésets izgrée
Zvezdí opsípjat svoda nebésen
Gorá zashúmi, vjátar povée
Balkánat pée haidúshka pésen
14

This is a rather tame transcription which does not even begin to register the sound of the
poem. For starters, it needs to be supplemented by a short exercise in phonetic
gymnastics in addition to a few diacritical improvements.
Discussions of poetry’s music usually focus on vowels. But musicality should not
simply mean vowels. For one thing, certain sounds like l, m, n, etc., are hard to place in
only one category (Indeed, the very operations of affrication, voicedness, plosiveness etc.
– all pertaining to the discussion of consonants – already contain musical aspects.
Consonants are the hidden cache of musicality).
15
For another, the contortions of the
tongue are a lot more intriguing, and one does not want to miss out on this by limiting
oneself to, say, six sounds.
16

***
Exercise One: In RP, the t, d, l, n, are realized by the tip of the tongue pressing against
the mouth’s roof (or alveolar ridge). In Bulgarian, as in Irish, no such exertions are
required. Instead of being alveolar, these sounds are dental. Try loosening the taut
curvature of the English “t” and let the very tip of the tongue comfortably slide between

14
Cf. CD, Track 1.

15
The Calypso singers from Trinidad, for instance, often rhyme on ‘n’, ‘ng’, ‘l’, etc.

16
The six vowels in the Bulgarian language are ‘a’ (as in ‘cup’); ‘uh’ (a kind of reduced Bulgarian ‘a’ and
quite curt as in ‘yes suhr’ or ‘cuhrt’); ‘o’ (as in ‘top’ but pronounced in the British way); ‘u’ (as in the
Spanish ‘curva’); ‘e’ (as in ‘bed’); ‘i’ (as in ‘tin’). In quick succession: a – uh – o – u – e – i.
20
the upper and lower front teeth. Then release easily with little aspiration or fricative
effect: T as in toy (‘he’).
Exercise Two: Let the tongue stay where it is for T. Then draw it up very slightly and
place the tip of the tongue behind the upper teeth (there is still no “English” curvature): N
as in ne (‘not’).
Exercise Three: And finally, the Scottish R – heavily vibrating like a rattlesnake. The
tongue draws back yet further and is now heavily curved.
Exercise Four: These three progressive gradations of curvature from T through N to R
allow the tongue to start between the teeth very straight and easy, then curve ever so
slightly behind the front teeth before finally assuming the curvature (much more
ergonomic as in yoga’s back-flip) of R: R as in umira (‘dies’). In succession, this
amounts to T-N-R…T-N-R… Practice this!
17
This tongue-work accounts for the
consonants of toy ne umira (‘he not dies’, i.e. ‘he never dies’). Here is the full couplet
(perhaps the most famous piece of Bulgarian poetry): Toss (dialectal contraction of
tozi ,‘this one’), koyto (‘who’) padne (‘falls’) v boy (‘in fight’) za (‘for’) svobóda
(‘freedom’), toy ne umina…(‘He who falls fighting for freedom/ He never dies’). Of
course, there are some further necessary intonational additions to account for the fact that
this is a sententious statement which, like any famous slogan, is surrounded by a Delphic
aura and is followed in its footsteps by the history of its past usages:

17
You will find that for the Bulgarian T and N, the difficulty is in loosening the tongue. The reverse
process of tautening and tightening the tongue was necessary for the ergon-laden phonology lab of RP-
oriented Sofia University.

21
Toz koyto padne v boy za svobóda,
toy ne umira…

In order to sound Strophe 1 better, one needs a few orthographical additions. However,
diacritical improvements can only go so far, as we will see from the study of William
Barnes’s dialectal poetry. I will only add one here: the second –a in vjátar is a rough
Bulgarian vowel not unlike the –i of ‘Yessir’, when it is pronounced emphatically, or the
-u of ‘murmur’: Yessir ~ vjátir. Of course the –r is the rough Scottish R: VjátiR
povée…
18

On a more global level – and focus on individual sounds should never be the end of the
affair – one hears in the background the tradition’s tremulous eee which accounts for no
small part of the mystery of the Bulgarian folk song.
19
Like the ay of flamenco, the
trembling vowels of the Bulgarian folk song are a traditional vehicle of indexical
meaning as well as a carrier of emotion. In this sense, they function more as tones most
of whose intent is dampened when they become transcribed as letters. The otherwise
rough uh is also a favorite choice with folk singers for tremulous modulation. These
prolonged vowels can carry the sad melody of a song and become even more significant
in terms of semantic content than the words themselves.
But phonetic play in folk-based poetry allows mere sounds and the imitation of the
sound of the folk song to go beyond phonetics. Strophe one is also an example of the
grammatic playfulness typical of Bulgarian dialectal speech. The feel of this folk

18
Cf. CD, Track 4. One critic of Bulgarian culture in the 1920s asserted that the whole spirit of Bulgaria
resided in the ‘uh’: Buhlgaria.

19
Cf. CD, Track 1.
22
grammar is very difficult to convey in another language, but some of its complexity could
still be captured. The verb forms in strophe one follow a pattern: nastáne (is beginning to
become), izgrée (is rising), opsípyat (are strewing), zashúmi (is beginning to whisper),
povée (is blowing), pée (is singing). I have used the present progressive, but there are
complications. For one thing, the prefixes na- (of nastane), op-, za-, and po- change the
aspect of each verb. For instance, instead of stava (is becoming), which is in the
progressive aspect, we have na-stane where the na- is a marker of the perfective aspect.
Thus, a peculiar mixture is created between perfective (has become) and progressive (is
becoming). The finality (what linguists call telicity) of the perfective is undercut by the
non-finality (atelicity) of the progressive. The atelic event of becoming is at the same
time the telic event of having become. Since the verbs in the strophe are marked as both
telic and atelic, the sense conveyed is of something which is in the process of becoming,
but this is a process which is seen as having already reached its end (telos).
This universal markedness is further complicated when we take into account the
dimension of temporality. Verbs can be either finite or non-finite; for instance the
infinitive (‘to become’) is a non-finite form as are the gerund (‘becoming’) and forms
which are part of phrases like ‘let it become’, ‘is to become’, ‘must become’. Finite forms
of the verb ‘become’ include: ‘I become’, ‘he/she becomes’, etc, which are all marked in
Bulgarian (i.e. ‘I become’ is marked differently than ‘we become’) for gender and
number. The verbs in the strophe straddle both possibilities, i.e. they could be translated
as both ‘the night has become’ (nastana) and ‘the night [is to] become’ ([da] nastane) or
‘[let it] become’ ([neka da] nastane) except for the fact that the full phrase which marks a
23
verb as non-finite (‘is to …’ or ‘let it …’) is only suggested by the special suffixes of the
verbs (-e and –i). In the same breath, one hears both the finite ‘it has become’ and the
non-finite ‘[let it] become’. It seems as if the verbs try to suggest a space of atemporality
– an absolute “now” which straddles both possibilities of the two binaries (i.e. finite:non-
finite and progressive:perfective).
20

Things would have been much easier if the poet had stuck to the simple past tense to
which all the extemporized forms of the verbs in strophe one are very similar: e.g. the
root of nastane (–stane) is different in only one sound (the all-important tremulous –e of
folk song) from the past tense form stana (‘became’), which is in any case the expected
form in a descriptive passage of the becoming night: the night came, the moon rose, the
wind started to whisper, etc. A full translation of the verbs would look strange in English
but will do more justice to the mix of tenses and aspects in the original, which, strangely,
sounds natural.
21
A possible reason for the facility with which poets in the Bulgarian
language may naturalize grammatical oddness is the brevity (sometimes only one vowel
will do) with which verb tenses and aspects tend to be marked. Thus, individual sounds
become the carriers of grammatical innovation as well as musicality.
The night has-is becomecaming
The crescent has-is arisening
Stars a-bestrewning the heavenly arc
The forest a-whisper, wind ablowen
The Balkan singing a haiduk song.

20
I owe a large portion of this analysis to the professional advice of Ivan Arsenalov.

21
Indeed, if one was asked to name the grammatical tense of Botev’s famous strophe, the question would
appear to be serious.
24
Curiously, the only grammatically “correct” verb of the sequence is the verb pée (‘is
singing’) which is in the present progressive tense. More curiously, its grammatical
regularity becomes twisted and warped since it participates in a context of grammatical
oddness. But since this oddness is quite masterfully naturalized (i.e. the extemporized
verb forms sound as if they actually existed in the grammar of the Bulgarian language),
the oddness is once again perceived as regularity. In the present progressive form pée, we
hear correctness become deviance become correctness. In turn, the verb’s doubly
tremulous vowel (better rendered as –éé) seems to naturalize/correct the other verbs in
the group as the whole strophe sequence is made to sound – for lack of an existing
grammatical term – present progressive. The Balkan mountain sings with the voice of
tradition whose own éé’s reinforce the haunting presence of the folk song (pésen).
Examples of such lyrical oddments could be multiplied easily; they share one thing in
common: they are all profoundly indebted to a sonic vision of poetry borrowed quite
consciously from folklore.
Who are the folk after all?
In E. J. Hobsbawm’s view, the “folk” helps define the fictive nation.
22
Quite apart from
the idea that nationalism is itself an imitation of the folkloric worldview (a bad one!),
nationalist ideology depends on a programmatic identification of the national mass with
“the folk”. Thus, the folk is the logical center of a conceptual system. This definition of
the folk can be expanded to include not only nationalist ideology but also philosophical

22
Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, myth, reality, second edition,
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
25
or poetic projects. It is a slightly cumbersome definition, one of whose virtues is that it
depends not so much on a necessarily reifying analysis of folk consciousness (often
assumed to be un-conscious, pre-logical, primitive, etc.) as on the logical function of “the
folk” in these systems. This reading of the folk as a kind of generic fictional character
allows one to link the construction of the folk in modernist poetic projects to the systemic
role which the figure of the folk plays in other discourses: e.g. in philosophical works
starting from Herder and Rousseau via Humboldt and nineteenth-century philology (Max
Muller and others) and ending with Ernst Cassirer whom I see as having the last say in a
tradition of philosophizing about the origin of language.
Depending on the logical/fictive requirements of a given system, the folk may appear in
many different guises. For John Locke, as for Schiller (in his essay on the naïve and
sentimental) and Julia Kristeva, the logical center is the figure of the child. The child
carries a conceptual load which allows the three philosophers concerned with the
beginnings of idea formation, with simplicity, and with language acquisition respectively,
to build their arguments. In other systems, the folk could be the proletariat, the mad, the
peasant, the savage, natural man, etc. Philosophical works stage the figure of the folk as
much as do the poetic systems of modernist poets. For Lorca, this central character is the
Gypsy; Geo Milev’s folk is a new vulgar race with iron teeth; for Yeats, as for Synge, the
folk is the Irish peasant. This figure changes shape according to the requirements of the
poetic system.
23

23
For a Caribbean poet such as Claude McKay, it is the Jamaican of 'pure black blood' as well as the Afro-
American.

26
Discussing the folk of folkloristics, Susan Ritchie, taking her cue from Donna
Haraway, compares it to the figure of the fetus in abortion debates. It is a handy logical
center since it is speechless, hence needing someone to rescue it from its voicelessness by
constructing a theory about its inalienable rights.
24
‘Ventriloquist representation does
allow marginalized groups visibility, but only if they first surrender meaningful
difference.’
25
It is this ‘meaningful difference’ which philosophers, theorists of
culture/language, and poets seek.
Wolf-child, “Wild Boy of Aveyron”, savage, monster, cyborg, peasant, Aryan, Semite,
Bulgar, caveman, Ruritanian, Iranian, Scythian, Gael, proletarian, primitive, pre-literate,
unconscious, mummy, Liliputian, natural, indigenous, Phoenician, vagrant, tinker, Gypsy,
nanny, Adam, Iroquois, islander, Arab, Huron, Hottentot, Trobriand, Lapp, Turk, Goth,
giaour, “mere” Irish, Paddy, Sambo, E.T., Leo Africanus … The list of folk-figures in
various systems is inexhaustible. In all cases, the folk carries crucial qualities which
logically prop the system.
Maurice Olender traces the figures of the Aryan and the Semite in nineteenth-century
debates on language.
26
From a logical center in the discussion of the origin of language,
this folk couple assumed racial qualities and became substantive proof of biological

24
For Ritchie’s discussion, see her article ‘Ventriloquist Folklore: Who Speaks for Representation?’ in
Western Folklore, Vol. 52, No. 2/4, Theorizing Folklore: Toward New Perspectives on the Politics of
Culture (Apr. – Oct., 1993), pp 365 – 378.

25
‘Ventriloquist Folklore’, p. 371.

26
Olender, Maurice, The Languages of Paradise. Race, Religion and Philology in the Nineteenth Century,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press: 1992; first published as Les langues du paradis:
Aryens et Sémites, un couple providential, Editions du Seuil, 1989.

27
theories. In the nineteenth century, language study was intricately linked with cultural
critique and the representation of race. Thus, Ernest Renan (1823 – 1892) and others
derived qualities for each figure based on language differences.
27
The Semites had
capacity for emotion, passion, primitive feeling, poetry, tradition, and timeless truth.
Opposed to these qualities were those possessed by the Aryan: capacity for intellect,
analysis, conceptualization, science, progress, ever-evolving truth. In more negative takes
on the Semite, he, being primitive, possessed timeless truth, which could be construed as
mere superstition and refusal to follow humanity’s inevitable progress as it was ordained
by divine dispensation.
28

What is important to note here is not the specific racial type but the easy crossover, in
19th century racial theories, of key qualities (presented as racial characteristics) which
could be summoned up to fill the profile of any racial group as occasion required. The
empty slot for superstition could be filled just as easily by the Irish, for instance.
Needless to say, scientific truth, in this Arnoldian argument, was apportioned to the
English. This particular argument was often meant to serve as a compliment to the Irish.

27
Discussing Renan’s racialist theory of language, Olender says: ‘Onomatopoeia dominated in Semitic
languages, whereas Sanskrit possesses certain words that seem always to have had a “conceptual
meaning” … Ultimately the abstract reason of the Aryans achieved supremacy over the religious exaltation
of the Semites.’ (The Languages of Paradise., p. 74)

28
‘Many specialists … attributed to all Semitic groups characteristics ostensibly derived from the Hebrews
of the historical period. As a corollary, Renan and many other nineteenth-century European scholars
ascribed to the groups they called Aryan (or Indo-German or Indo-European) characteristics they attributed
to the Greeks. Within the Aryan universe, the energy and abstract intellectual gifts of the Greeks prefigured
the progress of the Indo-European world, while the Vedic pole represented the power of the primitive.’
(Ibid, p. 12)

28
Thus, a folklore aficionado like Sir William Wilde (1815-76) could enthuse on the Irish
predilection for spiritual knowledge:
A wild and daring spirit of adventure – a love of legendary romance – a deep-
rooted belief in the supernatural – an unconquerable reverence for ancient
customs, and an extensive superstitious creed has, from the earliest times,
belonged to the Celtic race. We cannot, therefore, wonder that among the but
partially civilized, because neglected and uneducated, yet withal chivalrous
inhabitants of a large portion of Ireland, a belief in the marvelous should linger
even to the present day.
29

The slippage from this benign formulation to views embodying explicit hostility was easy.
From legendary to superstitious to perniciously obstinate in believing in wild fantasies to
backward and even degenerate, the figure of the folk never ceased to yield ‘meaningful
difference.’
But this racial othering may sometimes have unpredictable consequences. Luke
Giddens has catalogued the ways in which ‘notions of degeneracy’, ‘imputations of Irish
savagery’ and a host of other rhetorical slights of hand (typical of 19th century racial
theorizing) placed the Irish in ‘wider systems of prejudice’ which Giddens associates
with the Gothic as a literary genre.
30
What he calls ‘the demonology of race’ is part and
parcel of the poetics of the gothic. At the same time, the ‘Gothic as a literary and cultural
form could be turned, through acts of semiotic and narrative appropriation, against itself,
thereby becoming a weapon of the weak.’ This is an interesting example of the folk’s
resistance to the appropriative power of othering discourses. To make such resistances

29
Wilde, Sir William, Irish Popular Superstitions, Rowan and Littlefield: Toronto, 1973, first published
Dublin 1852, p. 5.

30
In Gaelic Gothic, Giddens traces the systematic ways of constituting the Irish variously as disease-
carriers, savage, biologically inferior, insurgent/Fenian, etc.

29
possible, the systematic appropriation of the folk as a conceptual center must also allow a
self-reflexive response on the part of the folk to the generic requirements of the racialist
discourse. As Giddens explains, Gaelic gothic ‘was still a genre’ and, as such, could be
turned upon itself. ‘By redressing rather than disavowing the sins of the past, Gaelic
Gothic rattled the skeletons of its own vaults, thus going some way towards exposing the
calcified cultural deposits that underlie the ideology of race itself.’
31
In other words, the
systematic appropriation of the folk has its logical risks – and this is true of folkloric
items more generally in that once they have been appropriated as elements within a
system, they do not cease to have a life of their own. This logical insurgency has its
political counterpart in the historic role of agent which the folk often forcefully re-
appropriates from the colonizer.
32

A similar rhetorical turning of the tables is a central strategy in subaltern studies where
the philosophical project is to see the folk as someone who can speak, indeed as someone
who has already spoken through meaningful acts of resistance. It is the insurgency of the
folk which becomes the center of a rhetorical vindication on the part of authors interested
in a redemption story that will give back to the folk some of the agency he had lost
through systematic political and rhetorical erasure. One such case of erasure is when the

31
Giddens, Luke, Gaelic Gothic. Race, Colonization, and Irish Culture, Arlen House, 2006, pp 10, 12, 15.

32
In the chapter ‘The Vampire Strikes Back’ (pp 77 – 87), Giddens explains that the incorporation of the
Gothic genre by racial theory ‘carried its own ideological risks, for, as a genre residing in the protean
nature of language and symbolic form, it did not lend itself to absolute mastery or control.’ The figure of
the vampire represented in magazine caricatures by Charles Stewart Parnell – ‘who is portrayed as a
vampire preying on the innocent … body of Hibernia’ – is also, historically, the bloodsucking Protestant
landlord. Thus, ‘the very rhetorical force of Punch’s image draws upon – releases – a semantic field of
counter-associations that stands as an indictment of colonial rule in Ireland.’

30
folk is denied historical agency even when he appears to possess it: e.g. instances of
insurrection are appropriated into a causal view of (colonialist) history whose primary
concern is to point to the putative progressive aspects of repressive colonialism. For
Ranajit Guha, the ‘importance of such representations can hardly be overestimated. By
making the security of the state into the central problematic of peasant insurgency, it
assimilated the latter as merely an element in the career of colonialism.’ Since the peasant
‘has been [in the process] denied recognition as a subject of history in his own right even
for a project that was all his own’,
33
the analyst of historical records on insurgency
(records sponsored exclusively by the colonial government and thus exemplary of the
causal view of history) must read against the grain documents which appropriate the folk
only to mark him as a non-agent. Guha’s critique begins with a recognition that a lot of
ideological detritus has accumulated regarding the figure of the folk. Much of the
prejudice goes back to assimilative interpretations which proliferate images of ‘pre-
political people’ (Hobsbawm). But in order to understand the experience of colonial India,
one must realize that ‘there was nothing in the militant movements that was not
political’.
34
To the charge aimed at insurgents by colonial discourse that peasant revolts
were spontaneous outbursts of unorganized energy, Guha flatly replies: ‘There was
nothing spontaneous about all this in the sense of being unthinking and wanting

33
Guha, Ranajit, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Oxford University Press:
Delhi, 1983, p 3.

34
Elementary Aspects, pp 5-6.

31
deliberation.’
35
In place of the figure of the folk inherited from colonial discourse, Guha
stages an uprising folk the semiotics of whose ingenuity clearly mark him as the agent of
his own history. This is largely the ideological angle which subaltern studies as an
academic project adopts, and it is no wonder that one of its pioneers should have proved
an exemplary model of how to re-install the folk on a sort of historic pedestal. Much like
in Giddens’s treatment of Gaelic gothic, the folk of subaltern studies strikes back with a
rhetorical force derived from a close reading of the symbology of cultural and political
practices.
Not allowing the underdog of history to remain in its erased position looks somewhat
like a syntactic maneuver whereby the subject-less sentence (a sentence which seemingly
lacks a doer of the action) is rephrased to make room for the ‘rebel consciousness’ of the
subject to loom large. Rebelliousness and insurgency have proved attractive qualities of
the folk for the purposes of historiographical analysis. There is perhaps an irony in all this:
the understandable liberal desire to lend the folk some agency results in the construction
of a museumized folk – a kind of statuesque hero – who is capable, despite assertions to
the contrary, of a deliberate political consciousness, which is nonetheless a consciousness
that remains to be verified. But the process of verification (and for Guha it is largely a
semiotic reading – against the grain – of official documents written for the benefit of the
colonial government) leads to a necessarily reifying analysis of peasant consciousness
which is said to possess certain ‘common’
36
qualities. Rebel consciousness assumes the

35
Ibid., p. 9.

36
Ibid., p. 12.
32
qualities of a fictional character which is then handily categorized. The resulting
categories are taken to be exemplary of peasant consciousness more generally. These
‘patterns cutting across particular expressions’ prove to be the elements (or elementary
aspects as Guha calls them) of a generic figure of the folk. The aim, as in a lot of
mystifying constructions of the folk, is ‘to study the elementary aspects of rebel
consciousness in a relatively “pure” state before the politics of nationalism and socialism
begin to penetrate the countryside on a significant scale.’
37

In spite of this perhaps inevitable reification
38
, Guha’s analysis is fascinating and goes
some way towards filling in the figure of the folk who would otherwise remain an empty
cipher in the annals of colonial history. Guha’s methodology is also interesting if a bit
schematic. ‘[F]rom the terms stated for one it should be possible, by reversing their
values, to derive the implicit terms of the other.’ This antonymical method
39
whereby the
unmarked is reversed in order to become marked allows Guha to extract a code – which
in its representative generality is not unlike Vladimir Propp’s morphological analysis of
the wonder tale – which turns the tables on the oppressor and highlights ‘the presence of

37
Ibid., p. 13.

38
Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his account of the history of subaltern studies, is aware of this reification but
expressly denies that subaltern studies is inevitably a victim of this logical necessity: ‘Guha thought of
consciousness – and therefore of peasant subjecthood – as something immanent in the very practices of
peasant insurgency. Elementary Aspects is a study of practices of insurgent peasants in colonial India, not
of a reified category called consciousness.’ (Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Habitations of Modernity. Essays in the
Wake of Subaltern Studies, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, p. 15) Actually, as Guha
himself states, the elementary aspects of consciousness are derived directly from the categorical
representation of peasants in colonialist discourse. Indeed, at times Guha seems all too comfortable with
pitting two consciousnesses against each other in structuralist terms. Even the metaphors he uses are telling:
parallel tracks, opposite terms of a polarity, etc.

39
Antonyms: pure peasant reason.

33
consciousness’
40
embodied in insurgent practices. This code – extracted by an
imaginative reading athwart the official purpose of the actual documents – allows the
analyst to read folk consciousness as a text. The decisive qualities which Guha’s
rehabilitated folks possess include things like solidarity, territoriality, etc. – in other
words, this is a bundle of markers which constitute the profile of the subaltern folk.
Guha’s attitude to what he terms folklore is curiously negative. For one thing, folklore
is unreliable because it is scanty. ‘An equally disappointing aspect of the folklore relating
to peasant militancy is that it can be elitist too. Not all singers and balladeers took a
sympathetic view of it.’
41
Folklore is therefore not an avenue leading one to the
consciousness of Indian peasants. But why should elitist points of view have no place in
folklore? Why should the folk be only insurgent? Clearly, and quite understandably, the
quality of mute unmarkedness is not part of the bundle of markers which the project of
subaltern studies uses to constitute the folk. And yet, despite his avowed dismissal of
folklore, Guha offers an engaging analysis of the complex symbology of peasant folklore
(without calling it folklore) in his study of the semiotics of rumor. In chapter six of his
book (‘Transmission’), we are in the verbally and visually sensuous space of the Indian
peasant where ‘aural signs’ carry a special meaning that remains impenetrable by the
governing authorities. This coded meaning which folklore often carries allows a sign
placed in traditional circulation to function according to a semantic range which could be
constantly invigorated with new meanings. The hermetic nature of Indian peasant

40
Ibid., p. 16.

41
Ibid., p. 15.

34
tradition, like much of folklore, results in a‘miscognition’ on the part of the outsider.
42

What Guha’s analysis establishes is that Indian peasants, far from being mute, can
produce ‘a welter of meanings’ and symbols.
43
What such analysis ultimately does (and
in this Guha exemplifies subaltern studies as a whole) is to return the sense of agency to
the folk. Instead of the subject viewing himself as alienated from his own destiny (‘a false
consciousness if ever there was one’
44
), he is now able to view history as a force of his
own making. As Dipesh Chakrabarty exclaims, ‘Guha insisted that, instead of being an
anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary of
colonialism and a fundamental part of the modernity to which colonial rule gave rise in
India.’
45
The void left by the erasure of the folk has been filled, as it often is, by a textual
intervention which constructs the folk as a carrier of a specific conceptual load.
Subaltern studies as a discipline directs a profound critique at theories of nationalism
which build a figure of the folk as an unconscious mass waiting to be mobilized by a
nationalist elite. Often, this approach leads the subaltern scholar to launch a critique at a

42
See especially pp 235-9. A similar instance of miscognition of the traditional symbology of peasant
insurgency can be found in popular movements in 19th century Ireland against landlords, tithes, etc. These
secret associations (the list which Sir William Wilde gives is long: Hearts-of-Steel, Caravats, Shanavests,
Croppies, Defenders, Chalkers, Houghers, White Boys, Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, etc.) had special
modes of secret communication such as signs, passwords, gestures, dress-code, etc. As Sir Wilde states:
‘[T]he grand feature of the ribbonism of that day was of a dramatic nature.’ (Irish Popular Superstitions, pp
79 ff) Public functions utilizing “code” included also mock wakes and funerals since these were the only
permitted amusements. (Ibid., p. 83) The proliferation of coded meanings conveyed through traditional folk
forms is a widely attested phenomenon across cultures. The Gullah slaves, for instance, used to
communicate important news to each other by means of coded songs which had insurrectionary messages.
The song ‘Go Down Moses’ is of this kind.

43
Ibid., p. 246.

44
Ibid., p. 268.

45
Habitations of Modernity, p. 9.

35
nationalist theory and its assumption that Western rationalism and bourgeois ideology
must necessarily be universal models for nationalist thinking everywhere around the
globe. But, as Partha Chatterjee’s work has shown, Western historicism – which reduces
peasant struggle to isolated or spontaneous and unconscious outbursts of pre-political
consciousness – cannot do justice to the complexity and inherent hybridity of popular
forms of resistance. These forms, which, if anything, transcend universal categories and
in their very heterogeneity present a challenge to totalizing historical narratives and their
reduction of the folk, are ‘stamped on the living beliefs and practices of the people’.
46

Popular history, according to Chatterjee, is not a rubble of superstitious beliefs disinterred
by local elites in order to create a usable past. Instead, they constitute a powerful
challenge on Western-style rationalism. In place of the usual equation between
nationalism and political consciousness awakened from above, Chatterjee stresses the
spiritual dimension (particularly through the notion of dharma) which distinguishes the
nationalist imagination in India from its European counterpart.
But again, as in Guha’s positing of antonyms to the Orientalist conception of Indian
peasants, Chatterjee’s analysis proceeds along the grounds of negation of the negation
which leads him to an opposite end of the spectrum. ‘[W]hat the principle of community
as the characteristic unifying feature of peasant consciousness does is directly place it at
the opposite pole to a bourgeois consciousness.’ Again: ‘We must grant that peasant

46
Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton
University Press: Princeton, 1993, p. 169.

36
consciousness has its own paradigmatic form, which is not only different from that of
bourgeois consciousness but in fact its very other.’
47

Despite being, once again, somewhat schematic, Chatterjee’s critique of universalist
histories of nationalism does two things which most “Western” theoreticians of
nationalism do not: it suggests that popular political consciousness is to be discovered by
a sustained effort to plumb the depths of local traditions and shows how nationalist
ideology actually uses local traditions.
48
Nationalism’s success was due to its retrieval of
an ‘inner domain of sovereignty’ from the recesses of national culture, a domain which it
‘constituted in the light of the discovery of “tradition”.’
49
It seems that the folk which
Indian (in particular Bengali) nationalism constructs is endowed with different (though at
times schematically different) qualities from those of European nationalism’s folk.
50

47
Ibid., 163-4.

48
See ‘The Nation and its Peasants’ chapter of ibid.

49
Ibid., p. 117. Chatterjee is here talking about nationalism’s strategy of locating the women’s question
within the arena of national culture but the argument is valid for Indian nationalism’s use of tradition more
generally, as the analysis of dharma also shows.

50
In all fairness to Chatterjee, it is probably impossible not to reach this (or a similar kind of) position
given the inherent paradox within nationalist thinking in colonial societies. As Chatterjee has explained
elsewhere (cf. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. A Derivative Discourse, University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1993), ‘nationalist texts were addressed to both “the people” who were said
to constitute the nation and to the colonial masters whose claim to rule nationalism questioned. To both,
nationalism sought to demonstrate the falsity of the colonial claim that the backward peoples were
culturally incapable of ruling themselves in the conditions of the modern world… [Nationalism] thus
produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also
accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based’
(Nationalist Thought, p. 30). In this sense, nationalist discourse is ‘derivative’; it is ‘a different discourse,
yet one that is dominated by another.’ (p. 42) If there is such a deep-seated relation between the two
discourses, and if at the same time one is explicitly pitted against the other, then the task of disentangling
the two discourses becomes very complex. Chatterjee solves the problem by dividing nationalist thought
into three stages or ‘moments’ (pp 50-1). The ‘moment of manoeuvre’ is where the peasant mass gets
involved by being acted upon from above. Since its consciousness cannot be transformed by its
reconciliation to ‘rationalist forms of an “enlightened” politics’ (p. 81) – something which, as Chatterjee
37
Similarly, it is possible to draw a map of ‘a “modern” national culture that is
nevertheless not Western’ and whose development ‘does not allow a simple transposition
of European patterns.’
51
Those patterns usually posit a folk who is refused a passport to
modernity. The backward, un-modern folk cannot possibly play a major role in the
nationalist agenda of modernization of local culture. But as some subaltern and post-
colonial theorists have shown, this is not always the case in marginalized (folk) cultures –
that is to say, the popular is not always ‘the repository of natural truth, naturally self-
sustaining and therefore timeless’ and stuck in traditional backwardness.
52
The folk’s
heterogeneity vis-à-vis a modernity conceived along the lines of Western historicist
models is often seen – falsely, as these critics aver – as a kind of ur-mentality, before
modernity. Small wonder, then, that nationalist elites – according to the perspective of
Eurocentric histories of nationalism – had to invent a solution to a seemingly irresolvable
paradox concerning the local culture’s progress to modernity: to create a modern cultural
model based on timeless tradition. Since timeless tradition has nothing modern to offer,

avers, is impossible since it would involve ‘a total transformation of agrarian economy’ – it has to be
appropriated. The figure of Ghandi (who is himself later appropriated as a kind of fictional folk hero by
nationalists such as Jawaharlal Nehru) is an example of this ideological procedure. As Chatterjee’s
description of ‘the moment of departure’ shows, his critique of nationalism is more or less in agreement
with the standard view of historians of nationalism when it comes to the perception of the peasant masses
as actable objects unable to bring about ‘true modernity’ on their own. ‘This ideal [of true modernity],
however, necessarily implies an elitist programme, for the act of cultural synthesis [of the superior material
qualities of Western cultures with the spiritual greatness of the East] can only be performed by the
supremely refined intellect. Popular consciousness, steeped in superstition and irrational folk religion, can
hardly be expected to adopt this ideal: it would have to be transformed from without.’ (p.51)

51
Ibid., pp 6-7.

52
Ibid., p. 72.

38
then clearly hybrid “modernized” traditions had to be invented which would both tap into
long-standing local cultures and facilitate the progress to modernity.
It is instructive that even a subaltern critic like Chatterjee owes something to this
general formulation of the post-colonial dilemma. Of course his interest in recuperating
the folk does not allow him to agree with the view that local culture is indeed timeless but
he does see a conflict between local tradition and modernity. What is not permitted in this
picture is the folk’s own ability to issue a plea to modernization. The agency, even in
Chatterjee’s critique of nationalism, is placed outside – in the hands of a local nationalist
elite. The dilemma is not the folk’s own to settle, it is a dilemma of nationalism as an
“ism”.
53

Negotiating a similar terrain, David Lloyd finds in Irish culture alternative
‘imaginaries’ (opposed to state-oriented nationalism and its modernizing institutions)
which are nonetheless not backward or un-modern but constitute a decisive influence on
modernization and hence allow us to see the modern as well as the traditional in a way
which transcends the usual narrow conception of these terms as forming two polar nodes
in a dichotomy. State-oriented (nationalist) ideology occludes these ‘nonmodern’ spaces
from its progressive version of history while postcolonial and subaltern historiography
should seek to reinstall these modalities as important undercurrents of modernity.
54
This

53
See note 50 above.

54
See ‘Nationalism against the State’, ‘Regarding Ireland in a Postcolonial Frame’, and ‘Outside History’
in Lloyd, David, Ireland After History, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 1999, pp 19-36, 37-
52, 77-88. ‘The non-modern is a name for such a set of spaces that emerge out of kilter with modernity but
nonetheless in a dynamic relation to it. It is … not the traditional, nor even, strictly speaking, the subaltern,
but it is a space where the alternative survives, in the fullest sense of the word, not as a preserve or an
39
interesting way of resolving the dilemma places an emphasis on instances of
‘contradictory modernity’
55
, while the folk emerging from Lloyd’s discussion is no
longer the pre-modern mass awaiting its transformation from above
56
but a transgressive
agent provoking the state to invent modern structures.
As Lloyd’s transgressive revision of Irish historiography points out, there are
alternative forms of nationalism which do not amount to a vertical integration of the
masses whose own (‘other’) ‘modes of social organization’ are mistakenly termed “proto-
nationalist” by ‘most Western accounts of nationalism’ interested in charting a historical
trajectory from the pre-political (inchoate and unorganized) to the rational and politically
motivated nationalist efforts culminating in the formation of the state.
57
Excluded from
the official memory which sees the state as the flowering of all anti-colonial struggles,
marginalized social movements, for instance, represent ‘different modes of subjectivity
than those of the liberal political subject of modernity.’ As such, they remain
‘[u]nhistoricized because … the alternative memories of the past are constituted always

outside, but as an incommensurable set of cultural formations historically occluded from, yet never actually
disengaged with, modernity.’ (Ireland After History, p. 2)

55
Ibid., p. 81.

56
The idea of the folk as a mass awaiting its vertical integration or ideological motivation by an élite is
hotly contested by all the postcolonial (subaltern) authors examines here. Heather Laird (see below),
following Guha, stresses the fact that conspiracy theories aimed by the authors of official records to explain
peasant insurgency cannot do justice to the complexity of the relationships between peasants and their
“leaders”. It is not the case, Laird shows, that Irish peasants must wait for an outside agency to show them
the way; ‘the relationship between Land League branches and agitating tenant-farmers and labourers was
far more complex, variable and ambiguous’ than the official account shows. On many occasions, ‘agrarian
agitation was shaped by the poorest members of the rural population.’ (see Laird, Heather, Subversive Law
in Ireland, 1879 – 1920; from ‘unwritten law’ to the Dáil Courts, Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2005, p. 70)

57
Ibid., p. 23.

40
in relation to the relentless forward movement of developmental historicism that
constitutes the alternative as passé.’
58
These movements were crucial but forgotten by
official nationalist historiography which produces ‘the modern citizen-subject as the
subject of the nation-state’ and in the process of this ideological interpellation has to
exclude these alternative forms of subjectivity which are hybrid and heterodox in that
they do not follow the exclusive logic of state-oriented nationalism even if they
sometimes include the goals of nationalism in themselves.
59

The liberating effect of subaltern and postcolonial historiography
60
, vis-à-vis the
hegemony of Western-style accounts of nationalism, has been, as Lloyd explains, ‘to
challenge both the assumption of the inherent conservatism of the Irish populace and that
of the traditionalism of Irish republicanism.’
61
In the case of Irish popular resistance, such
histories have shown that the ‘non-élite subject oscillates’ between various subject
positions of which the citizen-subject is only one. The ‘formal hybridity’ of this subject is
not merely an elementary (antonymically derived) difference (as it was for Guha) from
the subject posited by colonial historiography. Rather, this ‘inassimilable’ subject has ‘a

58
Ibid., pp 98-9.

59
As Lloyd points out, social movements implicated with the Irish struggle for independence such as ‘the
social feminism of Constance Markievicz’, ‘the racialist nationalism of Arthur Griffith’, and ‘the
republican socialism of James Connolly’ moved ‘at their own paces’ and had ‘distinct ends, only one of
which could be subsumed in the declaration of independence of 1916 and the struggle for autonomous state
institutions.’ (Ibid, p. 28)

60
Writing in 1999, Lloyd claims that ‘[i]n the wake of a still dominant “revisionist” history, Irish
historiography has yet to produce anything as self-conscious and theoretically reflective as Subaltern
Studies. Nevertheless, it is clear that the last fifteen years or so has seen the emergence of a large corpus of
non-élite histories: histories of agrarian movements, local histories, social histories of the complex
intersections of class and colonization in rural Ireland…’ (Ibid., p. 80)

61
Ibid., pp 85-7.

41
mode of rationalization’ which is ‘simultatenously and paradoxically disintegrative and
homogenizing’, traditional and modern, interpellated and non-interpellated, fragmentary
yet able to resurface ‘in moments of danger.’ This historic folk is no longer re-installed in
dominant history (once the aspects of its consciousness have been reconfigured) but is
conceived of as always remaining in ‘excess of possible histories.’
62

Thus cultural formations may be “traditional” in one sense and “progressive” in another,
but the larger point is that such terms do not do justice to the heteronomy of the folk.
Similarly, agrarian movements in nineteenth-century Ireland ‘cannot be seen simply as
reactionary or traditional: they represent continuously imaginative responses to new
situations that participate in the production of modernity, but in ways which evidently
cannot be seen as “modernizing”.’ Since these movements required a response from the
state (e.g. the construction of a national police force), they participated in the production
of a state-sponsored institution ‘long before any such “modern” institution emerged in
Britain.’
63
How does one come to terms with such movements of popular unrest without
changing the very terms of dominant historiography?
More recently, Heather Laird has shown that there were ‘secret and unrecognized’
forms of legality/resistance in Ireland.
64
Between 1879 and 1920
65
, Irish popular

62
Ibid., p. 84.

63
Ibid., p. 44.

64
Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879 – 1920; from ‘unwritten law’ to the Dáil Courts, Four Courts Press:
Dublin, 2005.

65
This is the period Laird’s account focuses on; popular forms of resistance, as Laird stresses, go at least as
far back as the second half of the eighteenth century with its Whiteboys and numerous other resistance
formations (Subversive Law, p. 25).
42
resistance focused its efforts on constructing a “legal” system of their own which was
more immediate in both its appeal and the discharging of its function. Like Guha, Laird
reads official history against the grain, and this allows her both to resurrect the folk’s
historical agency and to show that alongside – and even before – state-oriented
nationalism, the Irish rural poor had invented effective forms of political resistance.
66

These non-official systems of control (the “unwritten law”) included ‘institutions [e.g.
alternative courts] that paralleled in their proceedings and procedures those they were
invented to subvert’ as well as practices (e.g. the boycott) whose punitive logic was
‘substantially different to anything that could be found in British state institutions’.
67

Alternative courts, the saving and plowing of crops, the boycott, methods to delay
eviction or to frustrate sheriff’s sales, various creative forms of resistance to the seizure
of goods, anti-hunting agitation (e.g. poaching or the wren hunt), and other forms of
organized resistance lend to agrarian agitation (conceived by dominant historiography as
a threat to the just unfolding of history) the character of a systematically unwritten
attempt to write history.
These communal practices often had a ‘ceremonial and carnivalesque quality’, but for
Laird their importance lies not merely in the fact that they were a symbolic ‘inversion of
social hierarchies’ but also in that they represented a ‘conflicting approach to the concept
of law’ which was based on ‘just retribution’ against the law. Folk culture, with its non-

66
In the 1880s ‘two conflicting systems of control’ operated in Ireland; ‘popular disaffection towards one
of these systems – official law – allowed for its displacement by the other – subversive or alternative law.’
(Ibid., p. 16)

67
Ibid., pp 27-8.
43
official concepts and symbolic apparatus, was ‘shaping Irish resistance to the colonial
state and its legal institutions.’ Lawlessness and disorder functioned in this ‘alternative
system’ as ‘law and order.’
68
But the folk which emerges from Laird’s account is no
longer merely anarchical, while the popular forms of resistance are no longer the unruly
haphazard efforts marginalized by official historiography. Rather, these efforts represent
a complexly symbolic – and crucially – an effective means of resistance to the legality of
the colonizer which (to some extent because of popular forms with such widespread
appeal) never managed to gain hegemony.
In this way, resistance is both culturally complex and pragmatically successful in
effecting change – it possesses these two crucial attributes while at the same time
remaining marginalized by historiographic discourse. Heather Laird’s larger theoretical
claim is that subaltern studies allows these popular efforts to remain marginal, but what
her work (like that of Guha, for instance, with whose project she must by and large be
sympathetic) does is to chart a space which seems to coincide with the theoretical efforts
of subaltern studies which, too, desires to redeem the folk from the margins of
historiography. For all her purported theoretical disagreements, the thrust of Laird’s
archival work seems to benefit subaltern theory in that the folk whom she allows to gain
the spotlight of history is no longer an anarchical and futilely resistant disorganized mass
awaiting its political and ideological activation – for the purposes of decolonization – by

68
Ibid., pp 18-20.

44
an enlightened (nationalist) elite.
69
The popular forms of resistance which Laird traces
seem to fit David Lloyd’s category of the non-modern: these are forms which constitute a
current running parallel to
70
, but ultimately remaining marginalized by, state-centered
versions of history.
71
By remaining marginal, this resistant folk announces the limits of
official history from which the folk has been ostracized.
***
Driving through the mist along a narrow winding road in the Strandja Planina, I could
not but slow down and pause before one of the most spectacular sights that can be seen
early morning in the higher elevations. The road passed by a hillock moderately steep and

69
The resistance of the Irish rural poor (their ‘battle with the law’ as the Freeman’s Journal tendentiously
put it in 1879) ‘should not be interpreted … in terms of elite stimulus and subaltern or non-elite response.’
(Ibid., p. 15)

70
As Laird emphasizes, ‘alternative forms of control outside official law are not always a by-product of
conquest.’(Ibid., p. 23) They are sometimes, like folklore, an ingrained part of traditional culture whose
lifecycles are larger than the historically limited moments (however long and momentous) of colonization.

71
In her discussion of the boycott (Ibid., pp 28 ff), Laird distinguishes her approach from two views of this
popular phenomenon: the view which sees the boycott as a pre-modern (communal, familial) form of
resistance and the view which traces the similarity of its punitive mechanism to that of the English official
(i.e. modern) law. The second view sees in the boycott a modernizing tendency while the first insists on its
functioning as an alternative to the official arrangement. Laird sees in the boycott a hybrid structure
containing both ‘semi-feudal’ and commercial elements. Thus, it cannot fit either the pre-modern or
modern category. Despite Laird’s own assertion that the boycott escapes also its categorization as ‘non-
modern’ (in Lloyd’s sense), it is not clear from her discussion why that should be the case. Laird’s
insightful analysis of the boycott stresses the non-modernity as well as the modernity of this phenomenon
(pp 35 ff). It was modern in that it posed ‘a substantial threat to the state’ (But it is precisely in this sense
that it is also ‘non-modern’, in Lloyd’s sense of the word.) In the end, she offers an account of a
phenomenon which follows a logic different from that of the official law but which also cannot be
contained by revisionist (and state-oriented) historiography with its investment in ironing out popular forms
of resistance or cultural undercurrents which do not obviously square with an ideology positing the state as
the center of decolonizing efforts. The effective marginalization of popular practices by state-centered
historiography finds its parallel in the inability of the English legal system to come to terms with the illegal
act of the boycott whose criminality is not easily categorizable. But pointing to these parallel exclusions
manages to emphatically expose the logic of state-oriented ideology which marginalizes communal acts
just as it criminalizes individuals in the name of the whole. It is clear that these alternative forms persist
outside of both the state (i.e. Lloyd’s non-modern) and the legal system (i.e. Laird’s examples of subversive
law).
45
positioned at such an angle as to allow an open passage of sunlight coming in between
the higher peaks. The dew had fallen heavy and was making everything hang. And then,
on a sudden, as if by a miracle, a resplendent spectacle came into view: a multitude of
spiders’ webs, well-defined in their minutest contours and lineaments by the glistening
water of the dew hanging on them, peppered the hillside as if the whole mountain
consisted of nothing but spiders. Positioned thickly at various spots along the down-slope,
all in full view, the webs threatened to come out as far as the road as if these invisible
masters of the homespun were competing for pole position suitable for the display of
their work. Evidently, the anonymous organizers of this special event had racked up their
gossamer trousseaux purposefully angled to be seen by those who drive past. This
confident exhibition put me in mind of all anonymous spiders on all well-lit hills of all
road-pierced mountains with all of their invisible knitwear. Ultimately, this unseen
multitude, glimpsed only in fragments, viewed only from the right angle, stands for the
folk who is, like the spiders, off-the-road, non-apparent, and prolific.
Nationalism’s use of folklore
A more or less dismissive attitude to folklore is the accepted view within the
“modernist” branch of nationalism studies. Tom Nairn’s playfully petulant sarcasm
pretends to cover, in one fell swoop, the rich terrain of folklore:
Did no one ever fall asleep sitting through the 200
th
rendition of Homer (albeit
creatively modified by local bard, touches of homely color added, etc.)? Given
an opportunity, the folk themselves have invariably voted for the movie-house,
the tabloid and then the home TV screen.
72

72
Nairn, Tom, Faces of Nationalism. Janus Revisited, Verso: London, New York, 1997, p. 5.
46
As an exasperated riposte to a folklorist – who keeps insisting that various misuses of
folklore by non-professional outsiders amount to a willful brushing aside of its holy
daylight by an eagerly decadent, blind owl of Minerva in a hurry to announce the
beginning of his nocturnal tenure – the gesture is almost understandable. For, in this
scenario, it would be commentators like Nairn who are the blind owls.
Hobsbawm et al seem to think that folklore is always and only a beautiful lie, a kind of
fakelore.
73
One by one, national myths and traditions are debunked by Hobsbawm and
his allies as modern inventions sold to a country-loving folk by a group of individuals
with a vested interest in the whole mechanism of mystification. The Welsh eisteddfod,
the Scottish tartan kilt, et cetera – examples multiply the more one looks at folklore, and
traditional culture in general, from this vantage point – are all part of a universal monster
with many national heads. This celebrated but crude view of folklore has attracted
reactions from scholars of nationalism who are less sympathetic to the idea of a purported
modern provenance of nationalist ideology.
A. D. Smith complains that for some scholars nationalist ideology is narrowly
conceived as simply and essentially instrumentalist:
The return to the communal past is necessary if the masses are to be mobilized.
For Kedourie, the appeal to the past is part and parcel of the leaders’
demagoguery, playing on the atavistic emotions of the masses. For Tom Nairn,
élites in the periphery, realizing their helplessness in the face of the onslaught of
uneven capitalism, have to appeal to the sentiments of the masses. For

73
Hugh Trevor-Roper, in his essay ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’,
summarizes modern uses of folklore for nationalist purposes: ‘if they [the Scottish] indulge in music, their
instrument is the bagpipe. This apparatus to which they ascribe great antiquity, is in fact largely modern …
Indeed the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition is a retrospective invention.’ (in The
Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger eds, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 15)

47
Hobsbawm, the élites must fabricate a sense of community for the newly
enfranchised and mobilized masses, while for Benedict Anderson they must
create an imagined political community among people who will never see each
other through representations and narratives of the printed word.
74

From the standpoint of the “modernist”/instrumentalist, the communal past forms a
repository/quarry from which materials may be dug out selectively in the construction
and invention of nations.
75
Ideologues of the nation need a ‘usable past’ whose
parameters are determined by the needs of present-day élites. This is the attitude to (the
use of) folklore, and it may be folklore’s almost invariable link to nationalist ideology
which creates a picture of the former as material waiting to be consecrated, as it were,
from on high and put into use in a fake costumed ritual. The top-bottom approach, so
admirably summarized by A. D. Smith, to the transmission of nationalist ideology (a
view which, in turn, sees folklore as seeping through the pores of society until it
permeates a consenting mass) is meant to be an answer to a cluster of related questions
about the appeal, use, communicative value, and psychological force of an otherwise
conceptually and philosophically untenable doctrine. Thus, the philosophy of nationalism
is faced with the difficult task of having to explain the ism’s philosophical poverty.
Hobsbawm resolves the issue perhaps more easily than any of the authors cited by
Smith. For him, nationalism, a modern phenomenon, springs from the ‘insecurity and

74
Smith, Anthony, ‘The “Golden Age” and National Renewal’ in Myths and Nationhood, Geoffrey
Hosking and George Schöpflin eds, Routledge: New York in association with the School of Slavonic and
East European Studies, University of London, 1997, p. 36.

75
Ibid., p. 37. To this list we should add the pioneer of the school, Ernst Gellner.

48
resentment which were so characteristic of the lower middle strata and made the new
nationalism so attractive to them.’
Uncertainty about their status and definition, the insecurity of large strata
situated between the unquestionable sons and daughters of manual toil and the
unquestioned members of the upper and upper middle classes, overcompensation
by claims to uniqueness and superiority threatened by someone or other – these
provided links between the modest middle strata and militant nationalism.
76

Here, nationalism is largely a petit bourgeois affair. The psychological explanations
Hobsbawm offers are hard to challenge conclusively; after all, insecurities of various
sorts play a large part in a sentiment which, as a psychological mechanism, amounts to a
withdrawal into the self-same and a denial of the external or different. In such cases, it is
easy and natural to try to overcompensate on the level of both the individual and the
larger culture or nation.
But the “modernist”/instrumentalist account of nationalist ideology still does not
address the irony of nationalism’s appeal, forcefulness, etc., as a core of ideas. It simply
explains away the problem by offering pragmatic explanations for the popularity of the
idea. Where Nations and Nationalism could have come closer to the idea of the ideology
is in the discussion of language-planning. For the author, this is a model for the way the
ideology works as a whole. ‘The identification of nation with language helps us to answer
such questions, since linguistic nationalism essentially requires control of a state,’ et
cetera.
77
Once again, appeal to centralized control – and not anything about the ideology

76
Nations and Nationalism, p. 118.

77
Ibid., p. 110.

49
of nationalism, let alone about language itself – is all that is needed to account for the
ways ideology functions.
A historian’s immediate concern need not of course be the poetics of an “ism”. In this
context, I propose a more direct (at least from the point of view of the literary scholar)
answer to the rather intriguing set of questions which Hobsbawm raises:
What we need to discover is what precisely national slogans mean in politics,
and whether they mean the same to different social constituencies, how they
changed, and under what circumstances they combined or were incompatible
with other slogans that might mobilize the citizenry, how they prevailed over
them or failed to do so.
78

To an instrumentalist, language planning works by force and follows the logic of the
mechanism of construction/invention. Language is a mere cultural artifact – and that’s
that. Receptivity to centralized policies on language depends on practical conditions such
as the possibility to advance in society, to hold a non-manual job, to achieve a social
status of some sort, etc. And here, for a brief moment, Hobsbawm faces the inevitable –
to define language as an empowering social tool is to follow a narrow definition. So his
linguistic nationalism is restricted to the issue of language planning – that is to the
selection and privileging of one standard. The spoken language ‘raises no serious
problems’. It is the written/enforced standard which is both ‘symbolic of national
aspirations’ and indicative of a number of ‘practical and socially differentiated uses.’
79

Less advantaged ‘common people’ such as poor workers, who, apart from their local
dialects, have no language, do not appear in the equation. But, as nationalist ideology

78
Ibid., p. 110.

79
Ibid., p. 113.

50
itself recognizes, an appeal to the down-at-elbows strata bound by their spoken dialects
and their folklore, must be made if one is to avoid the inevitable conclusion that these
strata have no interest in linguistic nationalism (‘The working classes … were rarely apt
to get excited about language as such.’
80
) – hence, that appeals to their linguistic and
cultural products have nothing to tell us about the way nationalism works. The non-
nationalist folk is unconscious, cannot be got to see through an ideology, and is only a
pawn in a larger game constructed by an élite.
Vis-à-vis this rigid scenario of the workings of nationalism, it would be interesting to
see precisely how components of nationalist ideology mix with each other, and especially
how the folkloric component functions in this mix. What is the role of the folkloric
element; how does it mix with other elements; what does it mean to use it as material;
where does its utility come from; is it really passive material ready to be mixed at will?
Generally speaking, a defense of folklore need not involve rescuing folklore from the
stigma
81
of nationalism. To see folklore for what it is, one needs to come to terms with

80
Ibid., p. 117.

81
Cf. Fishman, Joshua, Language and Nationalism. Two Integrative Essays, Newbury House Publishers:
Rowley, Massachusetts, 1972, p. 40: ‘The lingering hostility of American social science scholarship (as
well as of much Western social science scholarship more generally) toward nationalism has been
transferred to the role of the vernacular in nationalist movements.’ The same might be said of folklore,
which is often viewed as a suspect, minor, invented collection of popular materials precisely because of its
role in nationalist agendas. But folklore provokes doubt, suspicion, dismissal, and downright hostility based
on ignorance from another significant quarter: the unease of the “classicist” towards folklore (e.g. classical
as opposed to folk music) is based on antagonisms peculiar to the history of the form of art or genre in
question which interdepartmental tensions only intensify. Hence the scholar of literature, high art, etc., does
not approach folklore from an empty-slate position. But interdepartmental give-and-take allows the arrows
of accusation to point both ways. The standard complaint of the folklorist that literary scholars (and indeed
poets) interested in folklore do not know what they are getting into when they analyze folklore further
constructs folklore as material alien to the mainstream literary tradition. On the literary side, this has the
effect of vernacularizing literary genres which purport to merge with folklore as these ‘minor’ genres
51
the fact that there is something about it which makes it amenable to appropriation by
nationalist ideology. Nor is there any need to deny, as do the “modernists”
82
, the inherent
connection between early forms of folklorism and folklore collecting (as opposed to the
science of folkloristics) and at least an inchoate form of nationalism.
83

To start from where the modernist stops, how precisely does nationalism use/abuse/re-
use/fuse folklore? ‘The critique of social constructionism furnishes the basis for an
alternative account of nations and nationalism.’
84
Smith argues in favor of what he terms
an ‘ethnosymbolic’ account of nationalism where symbols are not fabricated by an upper

become ostracized and debarred from communion with the larger mainstream tradition. These down-at-
elbows genres will be the focus of Chapter 3.

82
The theoreticians of nationalism as a syndrome of modernity expressly deny the existence of nationalism
in its developed form before the industrial era. Nationalism is, according to this view, an exclusively
modern phenomenon constitutive of modernity (Tom Nairn goes as far as saying that it is the ideology of
modernity). This poses the serious and onerous logical task of having to deny a link, despite all appearances
and data that such a link does in fact exist, between nationalism and cultural movements and phenomena –
such as antiquarianism or the old philology of the 17th and 18th centuries – which historically precede the
proposed starting point of nationalism (for Hobsbawm this is roughly the end of the 18th century). In
response to this limiting chronology, other scholars have pointed to earlier nationalist cultural and linguistic
phenomena. Josep Llobera, who challenges the Gellnerian model of nationalist development, claims that
the ‘overemphasis on industrialism is the result either of ignoring the medieval national legacy or, what
comes to be the same, adopting a modernist definition of the nation.’ (cf. Llobera, Josep, The God of
Modernity. The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe, Berg: Oxford/Providence, USA, 1994, p.
104) I side with this latter view; if one views folklore from a larger historical perspective, one could safely
make the claim that it is implicated with nationalist ideology from a very early stage in its history. Even in
its ancient forms, it is anything but unconscious, apolitical, naïve, etc. The ideological core of nationalism,
as Llobera reminds “modernists” is ‘to a certain extent autonomous and independent of structures of
modernity.’ (Ibid., p. 132)

83
Hobsbawm (cf. Nations, p. 104) claims that folklorism is not necessarily political: ‘there is no necessary
connection between cultural revival movements … and subsequent national agitations or movements of
political nationalism.’ “Cultural” is, for him, “not political”, when it comes to nationalism; this is a familiar
refrain taken up by many literary scholars who wish to destigmatise authors working at the frontlines of
national revival movements. For instance, Yeats’s cultural nationalism begins to seem considerably more
palatable once it has been distinguished from the political nationalism of, say, the Gaelic League.

84
Smith, A. D., The Nation in History. Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism,
University Press of New England: Hanover, 2000, pp 62 ff.

52
social stratum but are to be found within the deep historical past of the nation. The past,
not merely the invented memory of it, lives on in a very real way. Traditions have for a
long time (Smith’s term is la longue durée) exercised a more or less overt influence on a
nation’s view of itself (i.e. its collective identity), and its members feel a solidarity
(through shared symbols, language, etc) with past generations which is independent of
individual will. If upper strata have focused a significant part of their ideological
intervention on manipulative construction of cultural institutions such as myths,
memories, symbols, and language, their “creative” work is not tantamount to invention
from scratch. If we add to this the idea that nationalist-style sentiments existed long
before the age of industrialism, it turns out that nationalism is not an invention of a
tradition but a re-invention of itself. Its ideological mechanism consists in re-harnessing
old energies which are latent in the material it uses. The ethno- part of ethnosymbolism is
the old symbol (land, mother nation, golden age, etc), while the ism part is the process of
making the symbol take center stage in an ideological apparatus.
Memories of territory, heroes, and golden ages form important elements of what we
may term the ethnohistory of each ethnie, its own self-understanding. Thus, the
ethnosymbolic account of nationalism clears the ground for an originary moment of
nationalist ideology – before the intervention of elites – by allowing the folk to speak its
lessons in its own way, without the necessity to imply a top-down transmission of ideas.
There are some good lessons to be drawn from the folk’s own national(ist) self-awareness
– which, according to the constructionist, is simply awakened from above – regarding,
most of all, the mechanism of transmission of symbols and of culture in general. Most of
53
the imagined/invented/constructed events of nationalist mythology ‘have been
remembered and handed down by successive generations of the community. They are all
the more powerful in scope and intensity when they are linked to particular institutions
like the law, the church, the state, or the schools.’ What is more, they ‘are embedded in
languages, customs, rituals and mores, as well as in the arts and crafts, music and dances,
of ethnic communities, all of which make up the ethnohistory of culture communities.’
85

Invention, as A. D. Smith argues elsewhere, ‘must be understood in its other sense of a
novel recombination of existing elements.’
86
But what exactly does the process of
recombination consist of? How can we go beyond Fishman’s schematic enumeration of
functions of folklore?
87
A good start is Josep Llobera’s challenge of the modernist thesis.
Llobera defines nationalism as a kind of tribal religion, a communal performance rather
than a set of ideas developed by an elite think tank. ‘In this vision of the nation as a
phenomenological construction the emphasis is on the performative acts or celebrations
in which participants communicate and share values (land, history, ancestors, myths,
etc.)’.
88
But what Llobera arrives at is a self-forgetful mass, an intoxicated tribalism, a
passionate song chanted on the fringe of civilization. In his conception, emphasizing as it
does the Herderian elements of nationalism, it is quite natural for nationalism to go to

85
Ibid., p. 68.

86
A. D. Smith ed., Ethnicity and Nationalism, p. 72.

87
The functions of folklore Fishman identifies include service as a link to a glorious past, as a link with
authenticity, and as contrastive self-identification (cf. Language and Nationalism. Two Integrative Essays,
pp 44 ff).

88
Llobera, Josep, The God of Modernity. The Development of Nationalism in Western Europe, Berg:
Oxford/Providence, USA, 1994, p. 144.
54
folklore if part of its tool-kit of ideas is to include things like eternal links to the land,
nostalgia for the golden past, anti-rationalism, populism, etc. Folklore, in this circular
view, is itself an admirable example of all these qualities. Hobsbawm and his allies would
nod in agreement.
The emphasis on the performative aspect of nationalism returns some of the agency to
“the people” but in the end the agency ends up belonging to the ideology itself. If the
folkloric subject (e.g. the flamenco gypsy singing his deep song) is allowed to have
agency by nationalist ideology, it is only within the framework of the performative act
that this agency is allowed to function. Beyond the ideological enframing of folklore, the
actual folk (e.g. the Gypsy in real life) is nothing more than a cipher. Within the
ideologically framed performance, this folk is acarrier of crucial qualities. We see then
that nationalism as an ideology is an instance of borrowed agency. Thus, while the folk
does the performing, it is often various élites which supply, if not the rituals themselves,
then at least the ideological encouragement for their performance. Nationalism’s use of
folklore is, then, a subtly effective side-show. Without pretending to acquire the bragging
rights of a full-fledged voice, nationalist ideology is content to sit back and imitate the
movements of the main actors in a clever pantomime. The moves of folklore become the
functions of nationalist ideology.
Nothing illustrates the stereotypical image of the appropriation of folklore by
nationalism so well as the troubled history of flamenco as a musical genre. I can only
afford to give a brief sketch here. The story has all the important elements of the
interaction between nationalism and folklore outlined above: flamenco is very much part
55
of the ethno-history of Spain; it gave energy to Spanish nationalism which, in many ways,
used flamenco as a model to be mimicked; in its pseudo-idealist appropriations by
nationalism, it possesses that intoxicated tribalism into which ritualistic ideology often
degenerates; it is an original expression of communal drive which has its artificial
(“invented”) double; it has received a generous historical helping of the nationalist stigma
because of its abuse by the Francoist regime; its center-piece is the figure of the gypsy: a
folk figure designed by nationalist ideology for the expression of Spanish essence even as
the real Gypsy was being persecuted; its history allows us to answer the question which
the modernist school of nationalism rarely addresses: how exactly does nationalism
appropriate folklore?
Of course when it comes to flamenco (a folkloric genre with a relatively long history),
one can enumerate various phases of its history where flamenco becomes entangled with
nationalist ideology. William Washabaugh points to not one but six major isms with
which flamenco gets ideologically entangled. Some of these overlap while others
appropriate flamenco with conflicting (sometimes diametrically opposed) ends in view.
89

To put it bluntly, nationalism’s use of flamenco amounts to cutting its rougher corners, a
strategy whereby what is excessive gets curtailed and ironed out. What was originally an
expression of a long tradition of folk singing became, under the aegis of Franco’s cultural
politics, a tame, adulterated, civilized song with sweet modulations of the voice
performed against a background of typical colorful costumes, flowers behind the ears, etc.

89
Washabaugh, William, Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Popular Culture, Berg, 1996, pp 10 ff.

56
Gile Tremlett provides a succinct summary of franquista appropriations of flamenco:

The regime of the Generalisimo promoted what some people have termed, only
in jest, “national-flamenquismo”. The popular “copla”, and even the one
developed by many flamenco artists, was the radio music of the regime. In short,
Franco was pleased by the spotted shirts, tight jackets, and wide sombreros of
what may be called the “gypsy music-hall”. There was no lack of gypsies and
other artists who were happy to oblige. The singer Lola Flores, for instance,
frequently performed for Franco in El Prado.
90

During the 1940s flamenco became nationalized was well as institutionalized: it moved to
the tablao
91
– the official venue where flamenco (that is to say, its significantly diluted
double) became purged of extremes in order to become a highly artificial theatrical
performance. It also began to serve as an emblem of Spanishness. But the outcome of this
ideological transaction was that flamenco (that is the “authentic” art) now had to compete
with its own popularized image. Indeed, this proliferation of doubles has become such an
essential part of flamenco history that it almost impossible to point to one authentic (pure)
form amongst the multitude of spin-offs. As we shall see in chapter three, some years

90
‘El régimen del Generalísimo auspició lo que alguna gente a denominado, sólo medio en broma,
“national-flamenquismo”. La popular “copla”, hacia la que derivaron muchos artistas de flamenco, era la
música de radio del régimen. En resumen, a Franco le complacían las camisas de lunares, los chalecos
ceñidos y los anchos sombreros de lo que podría describirse como “gitaneo de music-hall”. No faltaban
gitanos u otros artistas dispuestos a bailarle el agua. La cantante Lola Flores, por ejemplo, actuaba con
frecuencia para Franco en El Pardo.’ (Tremlett,Gile, España Ante Sus Fantasmas. Un Recorrido Por Un
País En Transición, Siglo XXI: Madrid, 2006, pp 173-4)

91
‘The Tablao – from tabla – meaning plank as in a stage – is really the 20th century equivalent of the
original Café Cantante. A cross between a restaurant, cabaret and nightclub, tablaos consist of formally
presented flamenco shows which are generally staged at the end of a meal. Most tablaos have a bar area
and a restaurant style floor space with a stage at one end, and for a fixed price offer three course meals,
wine and flamenco show. Often critisised for presenting ‘flamenco for tourists’, the tablaos have fallen into
disrepute, and today the well known tablaos in Madrid are in a period of decadence…’ (Martinez, Emma,
Flamenco… All You Wanted to Know, Mel Bay: 2003, p. 69). The closest equivalent to the tablao in Los
Angeles would be El Cid. Its version of flamenco is precisely the mellow theatrical act designed not to
disturb the processing of food. A more pure version of flamenco can be heard at the Fountain Theater on
Sundays. Its biggest attraction is the voice of Jesus Montoya dubbed “the Pavarotti of flamenco”. The
flamenco capital of the US (if such a thing exists) is San Francisco with its relatively good dancing and
guitar-playing.
57
before the tablao, Lorca, too, became an ardent pugilist in the ideological battle for
flamenco. This time it was the café cantante – and particularly its association with the
demi-monde, with drunkenness, etc. – which had demeaned the true art; and it was
Lorca’s task to unearth the authentic version (what he and de Falla called cante jondo)
from its obscurity. But unlike the café cantante phase (which, in addition to
institutionalizing the art, had the virtue of serving as a breeding ground for artistic
innovation), the Francoist phase (what has become known as nationalflamnequismo)
discouraged new developments in the art form and focused on a universal, flattened,
theatrical caricature which included mellow depictions of happy Spanish life in the
costumbrista style.
As Washabaugh explains:
Between 1939 and 1975, Franco ransacked the past in search of symbols upon
which to build a new and unified Spanish identity that might be attractive
enough to lure tourists and centralized enough to be tweaked as needed to
promote the national interest… In this stifling cultural climate, folkloric
performances were cosmetically retouched to obscure any indications of
provincial loyalties. Traditional flamenco venues, such a bars and taverns, were
shut down because they spawned dissent and subversion.
92

This universalizing tendency of nationalist ideology found a powerful antagonist in the
regionalism of performers like Mairena who, like Lorca and other modernist authors a
generation before, insisted on the Andalusian (i.e. local) and Gypsy origins of flamenco.

92
Op. cit., pp 13-4.

58
In the end, Franco’s cultural politics tolerated andalucismo but only to the extent to
which it did not threaten his centralizing ideological construction of flamenco.
93

Another important venue for the staging of flamenco’s artificial double was the
españolada – a popular film genre in the 1940s whose main goal was to reassert the
authenticity of Spanish tradition and to build a unified portrait of Spanish identity. As can
be easily surmised, the music for these films was a sort of flamenco-like melodic song
(accompanied by the ever-present guitar) with artificially mechanic operatic trills which
are a far cry from the piercing modulations and the improvised coarseness of the
seguiriya extolled by Lorca and others. As Anne Hardcastle puts it:
Due to its comic and escapist vision of Spanish life, the españolada was so
common and popular a film product during the post-war years that is has
become nearly synonymous with Regime film- making. Its images of happy,
rural peasants in folkloric dress supported a controlled, hierarchical class
structure and the idea of Spanish “difference” embedded in a rejection of
modernity associated with the early National Catholicism of the Falange fascist
party.
94

As both the tablao and t españolada show, nationalism uses folklore only as a
shorthand. Since, as nationalist ideologues well know, images which become part of the
communal memory have a staying magical power, it is quite natural for nationalist
ideology to select its material from folkloric traditions in a carefully planned but
ultimately hollow performance. Thus folklore/flamenco may, in the hands of nationalist
ideology, become nothing more than an invocation of images and symbolic associations

93
Franco favored artists from Madrid (which was trumped up to be the center of all culture) as part of a
regionalist “nationalism” which privileged everything coming from the capital.

94
Hardcastle, Anne, ‘Representing Spanish Identity through españolada in Fernando Trueba’s The Girl of
Your Dreams (La niña de tus ojos)’, in Film Criticism, Vol. 31, 2007, pp 15-35 (p. 18).

59
whose magical power nationalist ideology cashes out on. Ironically, the stigma which
folklore carries is explained by folklore’s own alluring power. Materials which were
created and worked out over a long period of time are simply taken out and used with a
vulgar, political purpose in mind. The way kitschy nationalism uses memoried materials
is by mere reference to established symbols. These symbols (erstwhile folkloric items)
function within the framework of the ideological representation as mnemonic devices
which trigger sets of pre-determined associations. The task of nationalist ideology as an
“ism” is to abbreviate: for each image it invents a mere reference. It only works on the
alphabetical and the shorthand level. It is content with establishing a chain of reference.
This picture of nationalism’s “vulgar” use of folklore is, however, incomplete. Just as
there are varieties of poetic folklorism, so there are varieties of nationalism. Not all
nationalist appropriations of folklore confine their ideological efforts to the mechanism of
referential abbreviation sketched above. John Hutchison’s typology of nationalisms
95

throws cold water on the view of the appropriation of folklore as an ideological free-for-
all. In the case of what he calls “Greek” nationalism, ‘[t]he pliability of the preferred past
was an undisguised blessing not available to those movements related to Great Traditions
whose classical remains were widely known and highly regarded.’ In Greece, you would
not be able to substitute at will, to invent material as occasion requires, to scrap traditions,
or to freely recombine elements. Bulgarian and Irish nationalist folklorisms both roughly
conform to the “Greek” model.

95
Cf. Hutchison, John, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the
Irish Nation State, Allen and Unwin: London, 1987, p. 140.

60
Hans Kohn, the widely recognized purveyor of stereotypical dichotomies in his
typology of nationalism, adds an important idea which helps with the understanding of
the complexity of folkloric appropriation as a cultural mechanism. He saw “Eastern”
nationalism as a more passionate variant and an ideological legatee of Western influence.
In his view, nationalism spread from the West (center) to the peripheries in Eastern and
Central Europe and territories outside Europe.
96
Eastern nationalism was marked by
appeal to folklore and to emotion/passion. It was a “hot” nationalism. The West’s nations
were ‘firmly constituted in their political life’, they were confident and their nationalism
sprang from rational ideals such as individual liberty. On the periphery, where cultures
lacked confidence, nationalism was marked by an inferiority complex compensated by
over-emphasis. Hence, this type of nationalism (German, East European, Indian)
‘appeared as something deeper, richer in problems and potentialities.’ Its hotness comes
from the heart-felt nature of its dedication. ‘The quest for its meaning, the musing about a
national “soul” or “mission”, the discussion of its relationship to the West, all these
became characteristic of the new nationalism.’ Kohn is here describing cultural trends not
limited to nationalism. Indeed, as my discussion of Bulgarian and Irish modernisms will
illustrate, the search for national differentiation, the juxtaposition with the West, the
outside-inside approach to the “ism” as an ideological corpus, all the soul-searching, the
struggle with definitions and the ways in which these definitions apply to the native

96
‘Yet this very dependence on the West hurt the pride of the native educated class, as soon as it began to
develop its own nationalism, and led it oppose the “alien” example and its liberal and rational outlook.
Thus the new nationalism looked for its justification and differentiation from the West to the heritage of its
past.’ (Kohn, Hans, Nationalism. Its Meaning and History, revised edition, D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc.:
London, UK and Princeton, New Jersey, 1965, p. 30)
61
context, the consciousness that, to an extent, a “foreign” system is being grafted onto a
local culture, etc. – all these issues generate a dynamism which is like the dynamism of
the conscious acquisition of a new language, the construction of a heartfelt grammar. Add
to this the appeal to one’s own culture (including all the problems arising from this
system and its juxtaposition with modern reality) and the landscape gets really ‘rich’.
Without necessarily following Kohn on his geography or, indeed, his idea that Eastern
nationalism came as a reaction to Western influence
97
, we can still remain alert to the
unusual aspects of nationalism’s appropriation of folklore hinted by his model. Anything
but a free process of recombination of passive, ready-to-use material is required in the
ideological/cultural context described by Kohn. One may go on and disagree with the
specifics of Kohn’s argument – e.g. that the emotional kind of nationalism amounts to a
strict process of substitution
98
– but the larger point still stands: nationalist folklorism is
not always the kitschy ideology we are accustomed to associate with fascist regimes such
as those of Franco and Mussolini.
99
It is perhaps in this context that one might place
literary modernism’s appropriation of folklore insofar as this poetic appropriation shares
the goals of cultural nationalism. This is not to say that the two types of appropriation

97
Herder was indeed an influence in the “East”, but I hope, in what follows, to complicate the landscape by
focusing on the own aspect of the foreign-own hybrid.

98
German nationalism substituted the rational concept of citizenship with the ‘infinitely vaguer concept of
folk – in German Volk – which lent itself to the embroideries of imagination and the excitations of emotion.
The folk’s roots supposedly reached into the soil of the remote past.’ (Kohn, Hans, Nationalism. Its
Meaning and History, p. 30)

99
For Danilo Kis, the connection between folkloric kitsch and nationalism is a given: ‘Kitsch and folklore,
or rather folkloric kitsch, is nothing else but disguised nationalism. It is a fertile ground for nationalistic
ideology. The expansion of folklore in the world today is not a product of increased interest in
anthropology but of the rise of nationalism.’ Cf. Kis, Danilo, ‘On Nationalism’, in Performing Arts Journal,
Vol. 18, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 13-17 (p. 14).

62
coincide – rather, placing the poetic folklorism of modernists like Synge,Yeats, Lorca
and Geo Milev within this, as it were, “Eastern” context, allows the deep resonances
which local traditions continue to have in the context of various appropriations of these
traditions to come into full view.
***
It is obvious that to an extent the process of ideological/poetic appropriation produces
“invented” traditions
100
. Examples of this process can be multiplied: turn-of-the-century
Irish balladry, the prolific composition of flamenco coplas by Spain modernismo, etc.
And yet, the crucial role which folklore plays in this process of invention should not be
underestimated. Traditions are not invented from scratch and in most cases they have at
least a believable model taken from the folkloric tradition.
101
In some cases, one may
even view this process of invention as a prolongation of the folkloric tradition. In other
words, modern inventions themselves become part of folklore. This need not mean that
all of folklore is invented in this way, nor does that make recent (i.e. more modern)
folkloric developments fake or less authentic than traditions which have an older
origin.
102
Sometimes, new developments discard old forms but reproduce the crucial

100
In the pejorative sense propagated by historians of nationalism.

101
The eisteddfod is not only “invented”.

102
The fact that some of folklore is (re-)invented does not account for the plethora of folkloric
developments which are much more autochthonous than someone like Hobsbawm would allow. The more
recent versions of folklore sponsored by government apparatuses do not account for the plethora of
folkloric forms which continue to develop from the grass-roots: side by side with the oireachtas there is the
pattern or the rambling house or the station; the sabor in Bulgaria (something like the eisteddfod: lit. ‘a
gathering’) has its non-state-sponsored rivals in the sedyanka or the vecherinka, not to mention the
nadpyavane (singing contest) which can happen extemporaneously even today. Hobsbawm et al. seem to
imply that anything in folk life which has some kind of official sanction must not be genuine. Similarly, the
63
qualities of the forsaken traditions. Sometimes, these qualities are so distilled that only a
keen knowledge of the folkloric tradition can recognize their ghostly presence in the new
forms. To realize this is both to disagree with Hobswaum’s inventedness thesis (in its
insistence that most of so-called folklore amounts to modern forms re-creating old
materials as well as in its assumption that such re-creation always results in non-authentic
forms) and to agree with it (insofar as folklore can spearhead culture by the production of,
strictly speaking, non-authentic folk-based cultural forms).
103

In chapter two, the idea of the invention of forms based on folk models will be explored
in more detail: there the focus will be on Yeats’s performative act (the speaking to notes)

view that once a folkloric enactment enters the cash nexus it stops being folklore is also untenable. To think
that the twin forces of modernization and commodification have colluded to erase folklore from its
“authentic” existence is to ignore so much. In what way are football chants compromised by the fact that
the title poet laureate in the area of the football poem brings a financial reward larger than that given to the
actual poet laureate in England? Does that make the football song stop being a folkloric genre? What if, say,
military chants are in some sense ideologically sponsored by the state? Does that mean that their existence
is “invented” in the crudely reductive sense alluded to above? I do not know how the argument would go;
perhaps something like the following: the military is part of the state: the state keeps its soldiers in line:
even their resistance (if such there is in their chants) is part of the ideological co-option: therefore all the
soldiers can do in terms of verbally enriching their organized existence (or creatively whiling away their
time) as local barrack tradition demands is “invented”… I suppose the larger argument is that
modernization – and hence officialdom – has clawed its way into the farthest recesses of a society; but even
if that is granted, what the inventedness thesis ignores is the possibility for folklore to continue to exist in
spite of – and sometimes even in cahoots with – modernization and commodification. In the caves of
Sacromonte in Granada where the gypsies have lived for many years, one can both get a beer by paying for
it and listen to authentic (no less!) flamenco in spite of the fact that the whole act is specifically geared
towards catering to the tourist who desires to experience the “authentic” local culture and that that latter
authenticity is in many ways a tourist “invention”. But even if the flamenco that one can hear while paying
for one’s beer is significantly different from the flamenco that the gypsies perform for their own pleasure –
i.e. the performative act which is outside of the cash nexus – this does not make the other (real flamenco)
cease to exist. Or, perhaps the perverse argument has it that once a performer enters the cash nexus, then
any subsequent act of performance gets somehow tainted by the logic of the market, hence the authentic,
autochthonous form is irretrievably lost… In my opinion, it takes a whole lot of superciliousness (and a
series of mistaken assumptions about folkloric performance) to think that.

103
It should also be noted in this connection that, generally speaking, folklore is not averse to
modernization and re-invention. Its own lifecycles include both conservative retention of forms and
morphing into ever newer forms.

64
which is consciously modeled on local Irish tradition. But this modeling is very elusive
since the tradition(s) Yeats reconstructs borrow(s) freely from various moments (some
perhaps altogether imaginary) spanning a large period of time from a hazy antiquity to his
present. His (and Florence Farr’s) method of speaking verse to musical notes seems to fit
the definition of an invented tradition both politically and formally. For one thing, his
idea was to help accelerate Irish culture by contributing to popular tradition with his own
(“invented”) form – that is with his own tributary to the larger current of the Irish cultural
renaissance. For another, this new method of speaking verse required the imagination to
go back in time a long way in order to find specific clues as to what precise traditional
form the new method should take as its predecessor-model. In the end, Yeats seems to
have settled on a mix of traditions, excerpting sometimes specific qualities (and distilling
them into his own method) and sometimes actual folk forms. It seems then that his
method had multiple origins some of which appear to be imagined as having existed. My
claim in chapter two will not be that Yeats invented “folklore” (although he sincerely
hoped that his speaking to notes would be picked up as a general practice and reach a
wide popular appeal in Ireland) but simply that he appropriated it and modeled his
performance on some crucial qualities and forms of traditional folkloric enactments.
104

104
When the case for Yeats’s poetic folklorism is stated in this way, it comes a little closer to doing full
justice to the hybridity of Irish tradition: as will become evident from my analysis of the method of
speaking to notes, there is a significant “aristocratic” (i.e. cliquish and elitist) element in the Irish tradition
of bardism. In other words, we are dealing with what was originally a non-popular tradition which – to
Yeats’s view – had survived in Ireland among peasants. In his more idealistic statements, Yeats explicitly
links peasant culture with aristocratic culture seeing in the Irish peasant a kind of aristocracy of the spirit.
Centuries ago, Yeats claimed, when modern ways had not yet intervened, the aristocrat and the peasant
lived in unison. In modern times, traces of the old aristocratic culture still survived among the Irish
peasantry. Hence, his method of speaking to notes is a distillation of qualities (some of which belonged to
aristocratic culture) and forms, while the process of distillation itself is viewed by Yeats as a property of the
65
Yeats, in a sense, invented a hybrid tradition – but even in this respect he was in tune the
Irish tradition.
Accelerated development of culture
Moving in the wake of a colossal cultural demolition project pursued consistently and
vengefully by the Ottoman oppressor, a fledgling liberated Bulgarian state was facing
two extremely complex issues around the turn of the 20th century: how to catch up with
modernizing European culture given nearly five centuries of colonial erasure, and how to
appeal to the broad mass of citizens who, after a short-lived spark of enthusiastic belief in
the future well-being of the state, had returned to a skepticism regarding the integrity of
the leading élites in the years after Liberation. In this context of doubt and disillusion, the
hung-over nation which had drunk from the pure springs of heroic fervor was groping for
answers. Intellectuals felt the need to reinvent the pathos of the Bulgarian “Renaissance”
and Liberation movements which had produced selfless heroes as well as fine poets. “The
Young Ones”, as the literary modernists called themselves, were in open rebellion against
“The Old Ones” while, at the same time, trying to outscore their immediate predecessors
in their enthusiastic attempts at cultural rejuvenation.
105
If the old school had won a major

folkloric tradition. One may venture to conclude that Yeats took from Irish tradition both the method and
the form.

105
The Old Ones were the generation which had witnessed the overthrowing of the Turkish yoke (1878),
the subsequent cutting up of the country into an independent zone and a vassalage, and finally the
Unification (1885) of the two zones into the modern state of Bulgaria. They “participated” in the national
project of resistance in the years leading up to Liberation by the strength of their pen. Not all survived. Of
the Old Ones, the most prominent were Vazov (who continued to rest on the laurels of his early poetic fame
and in his senile years took to writing popular verse to be enjoyed on the frontlines during the Balkan Wars
(1911-12); in the eyes of the younger generation of writers, he stood for musty old realism but had
nonetheless written powerful verse and prose in his time; his mistake was that he didn’t stop) and Pencho
66
battle which looked to be almost on a par with the heroic liberation efforts against the
Turkish yoke, the new schools, forming in the bigger urban centers, would renew
Bulgarian culture by instilling in it European qualities. The old ones struck back with a
series of accusations. What they called for was a realist literature which described the
character of the Bulgarian people, their way of life and their virtues. As for everything
else, it was decadent, epigonic, newfangled, “cosmopolitan” in the bad sense of the word.
The arguments in these heated debates are quite typical of a cultural situation in which a
young state is looking for its own beginnings.
The main issue, as far as the literary societies were concerned, was how to help
accelerate Bulgarian culture, how to Europeanize it. Should one disregard the realist
legacy of the previous generation? What should come instead: homegrown versions of
European movements such as symbolism and expressionism or a mix of European
influences with one’s own cultural heritage? These were, of course, the issues facing Irish
revivalists as well.
One peculiar outcome of this struggle among schools and issues was a strange
cohabitation, on a synchronous plane, of movements which follow one another, in the
canons of Western literary traditions, in a diachronic line. Romanticists rubbed shoulders
with inveterate realists and naturalists while diabolists had their afternoon tea with the
newest symbolists. The result was a busy cultural and literary scene where conference
among a plethora of “isms” created a complex chart in which vectors hardly follow one
direction at a time. In this magnetic field, where everyone borrowed from everyone else

Slaveikov (a minor poet by comparison and a kind of bridge figure between the old and new generations;
he distinguished himself by a nomination for the Nobel prize).
67
as well as from Europe (not to mention Russia), what is evident is a telescoped
development of the literary tradition. In a brief thirty or so years, Bulgarian literature
accelerated its development and ended up participating – from afar – in most of the major
literary schools of European cultural centers. The homegrown variations had their
peculiarities but the main thing was always the quality of the literature produced. To the
charge of decadence, the Young Ones responded with splendid works of literary genius
which took the essence of the foreign traditions and infused it with the unique qualities of
local materials.
It is in this context that the role of folklore is most crucial. The own part of the
“foreign-own”
106
hybrid was often the longstanding tradition of Bulgarian folk story and
song which had, amazingly enough, survived the Ottoman onslaught. The question was
how to use this traditional material. With what goal in mind? And here, as elsewhere, the
debates in both Bulgarian and Irish cases are quite similar.
In his 1927 article ‘“Own” or “Foreign”’, Ivan Radoslavov, one of the leading
theoreticians of Bulgarian modernism and a major figure in literary and cultural debates,
imagines a special role for folklore in the process of accelerating Bulgarian culture. An
easy way out of the aesthetic morass would be to simply imitate foreign schools. An
equally limiting approach is to follow a narrow conception of one’s own by imitating
local folkloric traditions with a view to recreating the ‘national spirit’ which, through the
ages, had kept the Bulgarian creative instinct alive. This dilemma was, for Radoslavov, a

106
Alexander Yordanov’s term.

68
serious problem of orientation which he called ‘the biggest issue of the moment’.
107
In
the West, where states had their own well-defined ‘cultural physiognomy’, this issue did
not exist in the same way that it existed for younger and more peripheral cultures. While
‘in the West’ foreign cultural influences were ‘assimilated with no residue’, in younger
cultures, where there is no dominant local component and a lack of certainty or self-
definition, the national spirit could not cope with borrowings ‘from outside’.
We must in our development catch up with this synthesis [between foreign and
own] and until we achieve this synthesis, the current issue will always be prickly.
The Liberation broke the circle which was stopping foreign influences… The
accelerated process of simultaneous destruction and construction leaves deep
marks on our spiritual development.
108

The desire to de-Ottomanize (similar to the Irish desire to de-Anglicize) provoked the
young culture to start from scratch by donning, topsy-turvy fashion, Europe’s new clothes.
The result was a caricaturistic Europeanism which, ‘like a moth flying toward a flame
from outside …burns its wings’. Severing all ties to its own tradition, this new-fangled
Icarus, which did not have enough ‘assimilating power’, was doomed to fail. What was
needed was for the national spirit to crystallize. But how does one accelerate that process
of ripening of the national core so that the young culture is ready to assimilate foreign
influences? Rodoslavov’s answer imagines a Bulgarian culture which inevitably needs to
fall back on its own folkloric tradition. Once the soil had been prepared in this way, new
seedlings from outside could be planted and the outgrowth of this process of
‘interpenetration’ of the foreign and own would bear all the ‘formal marks’ of the own.

107
Radoslavov, Ivan, ‘“Own” or “Foreign”’ in Misal, Sofia, 1927, p. 430.

108
Ibid., p. 430.
69
Even though the ‘formula does not in fact exist’, the general direction was clear: a major
revivalist project was at hand. Only the rich vein of the Bulgarian folkloric tradition
could function as the ‘mill’ which would ‘grind’ all powerful foreign influences. This
mill was still ‘primitive’ but a new beginning was evident in the work of literary
modernists such as Slaveikov and Trajanov who were prolonging an already inchoate
tradition dating back to pre-Liberation authors such as Botev and the early Vazov. But as
Radoslavov was aware, the process of grinding was ‘a gradual diffusion’. Acceleration
was the desired effect, yet one was not to forget that the process of crystallization of the
national spirit must not be attempted too hastily.
***
David Lloyd has shown that the production of folklore in Ireland was a political as well
as a literary task. If Irish literature was to be made to serve the nationalist purpose of
uniting the nation and expressing the peculiar Irish genius, if it was to cease being
‘minor’ and accede to the status of a major literary canon, the obvious way to accelerate
this ‘artificial evolution of a national literature comparable to that of other European
nations’ was to use local materials for the production of major works. Forging a canon
which would culminate in a national epic (which Ireland still lacked) required the
necessary groundwork of producing folklore from which the epic would develop (as it
were naturally) the way it had done in other nations’ traditions.
109
The “natural” choice in

109
Nationalism and Minor Literature, p. 3. David Lloyd explains that the ‘goal of creating a politically
unifying concept of Irish identity demands the virtual reconstitution of Irish literature as it were ab origine,
forcing a development that would theoretically have been the course of a national literature uninterrupted
by colonial power.’
70
this complicated cultural situation was the ballad since it was perceived to be expressive
of ‘the spirit of the people’.
110
But, as Lloyd shows, there is a paradox in the use of
Gaelic material (which had ‘great gaps’
111
) that ‘will give back a distinctive character to
an Irish literature which must perforce be written in English.’
112
The whole project is
essentially one of translation as well as transplantation. But since the target language is
historically foreign, what is taken out of the original is the spirit and not the letter. In
other words, we are back to Wordsworth’s idea of replicating distinct qualities. ‘We want
strength, earnestness, passion’, an anonymous article in the Nation enthused.
113
The result
of this massive effort to accelerate cultural production was a multitude of quasi-
anonymous ballads,
114
and in this Ireland is not much different from Spain around the
same time when almost identical folk lyrics produced by literati all of a sudden cropped
up in great quantity.
115
It was the anonymous voice which was perceived to be the real
expression of the spirit of the nation. For this reason, one had to make each ballad as

In an 1893 address to the National Literary Society entitled ‘Nationality and Literature’, Yeats charts the
logic of accelerated development of the literary tradition. Every literature, according to this view, had to
pass through three stages from epic to dramatic to lyric. Balladry was to be located in the first stage. More
advanced literatures – such as English literature – were already in the lyric phase. Irish literature had to
catch up by studying the style of foreign literatures. Thus European models would serve as a springboard
which would allow Irish literature to spring away from its ‘simple and primitive’ phase (see Meir, Colin,
The Ballads and Songs of W. B. Yeats, Macmillan, 1974, pp 24-5).

110
Ibid., p. 74.

111
This is Thomas Davis’s phrase.

112
Ibid., p. 74.

113
Cited by D. Lloyd in ibid., p. 75.

114
As D. Lloyd once remarked to me, the more of these there were the better as far as the nationalist
interest was concerned.

115
Something which García Lorca deplored.

71
similar to what was taken as the model as possible. It appears that the reproduction of
national spirit becomes tantamount to the reproduction of an ideal form.
116

The ballad, being a vernacular
117
genre, was nonetheless a central player in the process
of cultural acceleration. Yeats envisaged a similar historic role for folklore more
generally and for his small contribution to folkloric innovation specifically. For Yeats, as
his lectures delivered to American audiences show, the historic cycles of folklore are
much larger than immediate political interests could ever hope grasp. The nationalist
cultural movement in Ireland is, in this view, only a temporary instantiation of a larger
historical movement which can be mapped onto the cyclical movement of traditional
culture.
No, the national movements are not detached outbreaks of race pride. They are
part of a great war, of a war of the past and the future, of a noble past that tries to
keep itself unchanged, hoping, perhaps vainly, the deluge will begin some day to
fall, that the dove will some day return bringing with it a green bough.
118

Yeats sees traditional culture as waiting to resurface – waiting to be born again – amidst
the deluge of modern civilization. (Modern civilization is itself only a phase in the larger
history of cultural development.) But despite the fact that ‘we’ have ‘suffered a continual
defeat’ in this war, and that ‘we are a very beaten host’, there is a way to ‘victory’.
Although Yeats does not say it here explicitly, the way to victory is to accelerate culture,

116
I will return to the discussion of Irish ballads and their hybrid nature (chapter one) as well as their
importance for Yeats (chapter two).

117
I use the word in the sense of neglected or minor genre. Chapter three will elaborate on the idea of the
vernacular.

118
Yeats, W. B., Four Lectures by W. B. Yeats 1902-4, ed. by Richard Londraville, Yeats Annual 8, ed.
Warwick Gould, Palgrave Macmillan, pp 78 ff (p. 86).

72
i.e. to make it capable of survival in the face of the deluge (this is exactly Radoslavov’s
view). To win this war, ‘we must somehow or other change our arms and our formation
of battle’. These new arms will be the ‘modern means’ employed in battle. Yeats then
glides comfortably into a discussion of what those modern means look like in his
particular practice as a poet. His ‘New Art’
119
as he calls it is the speaking of verse to
notes. It is both an innovation and a return to old traditions. Yeats thought of it (and the
small movement surrounding it) as one of his significant contributions to the Celtic
revival. Long-lived ideals pertaining to old civilization remain strong and unchanged only
when the instruments of war begin to change. This somewhat paradoxical view embraces
the modern while remaining faithful to the crucial qualities of local traditions. In turn,
local/traditional culture, for both Yeats and Radoslavov, is seen as capable of
withstanding the onslaught of foreign/modern influence while at the same time being a
hybrid of tradition and innovation.
Folklore and Literature
Skepticism regarding the possibility of a voluntary “folk” identity, together with a sober
registering of the fact of its inventedness/constructedness, has dominated recent
discussions of the appropriation of folklore for literary purposes. Although addressed
specifically to the Irish literary revival, John Foster’s is a standard complaint:
Certainly the time was overdue for the Anglo-Irish to admit their own Irishness.
But this was no gradual self-perception; it was a conversion so rapid that it could

119
Ibid., p. 87.

73
not be other than unrealistic. Besides, to a great extent the leaders of the revival
were inventing a native Ireland in which they could comfortably fit…
120

Could there be another side to this story in which the sheer numbers speak louder?
Perhaps it was not so much a mask (donned by Anglo-Irish protestant Ascendancy
figures such as Yeats, Lady Gregory, Synge, and other authors of the Irish Renaissance)
as it was a powerful tidal change which was far from being merely a mark of ‘unrealistic’
self-perception, a willful borrowing of authenticating folk robes. Granted, a certain
amount of deliberate posturing and ceremoniousness must have been an important
ingredient in the litterateur’s interest in folklore (Yeats, for instance, liked to call himself
a Celt in London in the same way that Lorca called himself a gypsy, and, of course there,
is something of the dandy in this). But this might simply be all on the surface. If this is
the case, then to insist – with an academic lust for skeptic truthfulness – on the
sentimentality and constructedness of the posture is to miss the point.
The communal volte face Foster describes is like a military command to turn around.
To believe in this command, to follow it blindly and to the letter is to be part of the
communal march, which also necessitates singing in order to keep the proper step of the
march. To stay in line, to form a tight formation and move in perfect unison – this is an
achievement! The excitement of this movement should not be underestimated; the
movement of literary modernism is part of this tidal wave. The fact that authors co-opt
local idioms and put their own signatures under the items appropriated from the folk
tradition is a side issue. Sure, their marching under communal orders coincides with a

120
Foster, John, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival. A Changeling Art, Syracuse University Press, Gill
and Macmillan, 1987, p. xvii.
74
strategically invented nostalgia, a well-instrumented move, but this does not mean that
the tidal wave was unreal. To complain about unreality is the same thing as to complain
that in a Christian baptism the water is not really holy and so the whole thing must be a
farce. But while it might actually be insightful to think of a Christian baptism as a farce,
it is not very productive to stay in the discussion about the (in)sincerity with which the
Ascendancy liked to play beggar. There are aspects to the baptismal rite (especially when
it is performed en masse) that make complaints about the reality of the water look trivial.
The compulsive need in scholarly discussions about the appropriation of folklore for
literary purposes to denaturalize what looks like a “natural” conversion, a self-baptism,
leads to a logical dead-end. It misses out on the fun of the movement of modernism on
the periphery. The self-absorbed excitement in building a literary tradition from folk
materials places modernism – in its moving aspects – squarely within the folkloric
tradition of cultures attempting to revive themselves. As hinted earlier, it is almost as if
the eternal folklore appropriates modernists keen on topicality and newness for the
purposes of its own survival.
The echo of the boiling excitement of cultural self-renewal rings back and forth from
all directions. In Ireland, no less than in London, during the club days
121
, the sense of
missionary urgency created an imaginary community with an expanding influence and
power. Like an unruly crowd, revivalists, littérateurs, activists and leaguers jostled each
other on both sides of the Irish Sea as the sense of a larger direction seemed severely

121
Around the turn of the 20th century (1880s – 1920s) Bulgaria too had its modernist clubs and its own
heated debates about the renewal of culture.

75
compromised.
122
It seemed that the forest did not know its trees. But what the
organization lacked in cohesion, it made up for in drive and cultural yearning. Its
direction was evidently one of growth outwards:
No study as yet has surveyed the movement as a whole, has taken cognisance of
the several schools within it, has recognized how much wider it is than the
rallying-grounds of the existing literary societies, how really racy of the soil it is,
how typical of certain Irish qualities, and how gradually its roots have grown
from various elements of Celtic Ireland.
123

We see the movement expanding in concentric circles to include Ireland as a whole
and even the larger Ireland of history. This expanding imaginary community makes
nonsense of the claim that modernists can simply show up at the eleventh hour and usurp
the driving reigns of culture for the purposes of sentimentality. Rather, they were caught
in the drift of the tide. In this drifting context, distinction was awarded for silent heroism
and for the ability to take one’s place among the rank and file. The figure which fitted
this dual profile of anonymity and heroism was, of course, the Irish peasant with his
spirituality in misery and his love for knowledge and learning of the traditional kind.
124

The Southwark Irish Literary Club, the Irish Literary Society (London), The National
Literary Society (Dublin) of which Yeats was one of the founders, and numerous other

122
In the words of William Patrick Ryan, early historian on the Irish Renaissance, “Even our leading
literary societies, working for the same purposes, are not yet like the wings or sections of the same
organisation. Literary Ireland in fact does not know itself.’ (Ryan, William, The Irish Literary Revival. Its
History, Pioneers and Possibilities, Lemma Publishing Corporation: New York, 1970, first edition: London,
1894, p. v).

123
The Irish Literary Revival, p. 2.

124
‘In our days, in the quiet villages and the lonely country reaches, learning is reverenced as something far
above the run of mere worldly things. The peasant’s inherent regard for the “ould stock”, the fairy kingdom
and ghost-land, is a simple force beside his reverence for scholarship. The spirit is there, dim too often,
always capable of expansion.’ (Ibid., p. 5) The inheritors of this spirit, are ‘a band of Irishmen’ driven by
scholastic desire and ‘literary ideals’, ready to serve as ‘apostles of study and culture.’ (Ibid., p. 6)

76
clubs, libraries, societies, leagues, branches, and chapters as well as desultory gatherings
and lecture-hearings on “Gaelic nights” constituted a massive Pan-Celtic movement
which operated with a perfervid excitement and an intellectual communalist ferment
glimpses of which can be gleaned even from a telegraphic transcription of its pell-mell
enthusiasm:
… program … scheme … centres many miles apart … Irish books were
distributed … Miss M- G- being especially zealous … made a spirited
beginning … H- was ever ready for active duty … John– and Miss– were steady
and prompt in their service … might almost be described as sensational …
rallied to it early … kindred societies … reading rooms … lending libraries …
spreading their thoughts … promptly undertaken … their mission would be
wide … to advance … willing aid … supporters actively at work … it lived and
grew and brightened … “Spread the Light” … it weathered many storms …
large number … rallied to the Club … sallies …storm barricades … promote …
popularise … missionary spirit … ’42 … ’45 … ’98 … assisted by a dozen …
channels … connection … earnest effort … atmosphere … our reading world …
high hopes and vigorous aims … general sigh … have banded themselves
together …new departure … ripe for it …
125

One of the main theses of this project is that the signatures of modernists begin to look
somewhat less weighty in the context of cultural ferment on the periphery.
***
Several other main thesis statements have dominated, with startling regularity, the
discussion about the use of folklore in literature: 1) the oft-repeated focus in discussions
of modernists’ work with folklore on belief versus skepticism
126
; 2) the dichotomy
between universal and local, usually resolved, in the interest of peace, into a mid-space of

125
Ibid., pp 16-131.

126
See, for instance, Bell’s chapter on Yeats (Bell, Michael, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and
Responsibility in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Foster (op. cit., pp 206 ff)
on Yeats and folklore.

77
the “both”: a happy ambivalent marriage of the universal-local which the literary
folklorist is said to have achieved in his or her work; 3) the outsider-insider: the emphasis
is on whether the outsider can possibly represent the inside of ethnicity.
In relation to the last of these three dilemmas, the notion of the possibility of voluntary
identity opens the discussion despite the fact that it looks severely limited in that it firmly
embraces one side of the bifurcation
127
: for one thing, if it is possible to plunge – as it
were naively – into the well of the folkloric and emerge in one piece, though not entirely
unscathed (for there must be sacrifices). Then the outsider status is no longer an
important concern. What matters is that now the folk poet is in the clearing (there);
having productively forgotten that (s)he is not of the same race or soil as the folk, the
poet folklorist has successfully inhabited the essentialist ethnographic space of the folk
and has heard the folk’s voice. Does it matter that the modernist author has used an
imaginary rule to draw lines within the ethnographic space? What matters are the bouts of
convulsing laughter, the all-pervasive presence of the sound of the wailing of the
sorrowful folk; what matters is the physical movement – tactile and real – of the slide
down the folkloric well. One has no time to think whether he or she is an outsider – the
senses are too busy registering sights and sounds.
***

127
I do not know of a discussion, on the literary side, which does not engage in at least two of the four
dichotomies; the strange thing is that all reach the same conclusion over and over again. Later, I will
summarize the folkloristic side which, refreshingly, does not mention these issues. Let me state for now
that it is repetitive in two of its concerns: it constantly complains about how literature expropriates/plunders
folkloric items and it accuses literary folklorism on the grounds that it lacks professionalism which results
in the production of a fakelore.
78
The false dichotomy of skepticism versus belief is another red herring which is even
more dangerous. What does it matter if Yeats believed that the Irish teller believed that
the common folk believed that the shee existed. What is of much more weighty note is
the persistence of the belief over all these stages in the transmission process. To be a
stage somewhere along the line is to practice this belief. What does it matter that amazing
grace does not exist – cannot we pretend that it does and sing along with the believer in
order to hear how sweet the sound? How can one sound notes unless one believes in them?
This, at least, seems to have been Yeats’s view of the matter. His emphasis is not on
belief versus skepticism but on a willing suspension of disbelief. At the same time, he is
aware that the Irish peasant can accommodate both belief and skepticism. In ‘Irish Fairies,
Ghosts, Witches’ (an article originally published in 1889), as well as in numerous other
articles of the same period, Yeats seems resigned to the idea that beliefs among the Irish
peasantry are erratic at best.
128
Various degrees of skepticism and belief sometimes co-
existed in the same community and even in the same person depending on the object of
belief: e.g. someone might not believe in angels and demons but may firmly believe in
fairies. What was important for him, however, was not what was true and what not –
what mattered was what a certain belief said about the local culture in question. ‘The
history of a belief is not enough, one would gladly hear about its cause.’
129
What was it in

128
At the same time, like a true folklorist, he treats them systematically grouping them in various categories
according to their central motif, main function etc. This is particularly evident in the six extended pieces
based on his collaborative field-work with Lady Gregory. These appeared in various magazines between
1897 and 1902.

129
In W. B. Yeats. Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth, ed. by Robert Welch, Penguin Books,
1993, p. 19. See also ‘Belief and Unbelief’ section in The Celtic Twilight.

79
a culture that caused this belief? What were the cultural givens which precipitated into
that? These were the issues which Yeats thought mattered. Faced by the modern dilemma
of how to deal with such a wildly imaginative relation to truth as the Irish peasant seemed
to exemplify, Yeats exclaims: ‘Perhaps the constable was right. It is better doubtless to
believe much unreason than to deny for denial’s sake truth and unreason alike…’
130

Recently, Angela Bourke has shown, in a fascinating fact-laden narrative, that a
particular belief or a belief system has multiple applications in traditional culture.
131
In
her work, she goes even beyond Yeats’s effort – at least as evidenced in his published
articles on folklore – to probe into the dynamic workings of a traditional belief system.
The beliefs associated with fairies in turn-of-the century Ireland (roughly the time when
Yeats was busy discovering Irish oral culture) served various purposes ranging from a
mere linguistic habit (i.e. a habitual metaphor which has become part of everyday

130
Ibid., p. 112.

131
The story of the burning of Bridget Cleary became a sensation exploited by the print media at the time.
Angela Bourke explores many layers of explanation and probability in her account of the incident.
Apparently, the husband, who was later charged for the murder of his wife, acted under the conviction that
the “real” Bridget was taken by the fairies and the person lying in bed in his house was not the sick Bridget
but a changeling fairy left in her place. The traditional cure in such cases was the burning of the changeling
since fairies are afraid of fire. Taking a child to the fire, in similar circumstances, was not an uncommon
practice; the practice did not commonly extend to women, as Bourke points out, which makes the case of
Bridget somewhat exceptional. Yeats, who usually focuses on the relatively benign instances of traditional
practices, including such potentially dangerous application of fire, tells a very similar story he heard about
‘a girl to be married’ whose husband claimed that the sick woman in bed was not his bride but ‘an old hag’.
Fortunately for the bride, the fairy escaped the second it heard that it was going to be put on the fire (cf. ‘A
Note On “The Host of the Air”’ in W. B. Yeats. Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth, pp 212 ff).
Elsewhere, Yeats made it clear that the ‘country people seldom do more than threaten the dead person put
in the living person’s place, and it is, I am convinced, a sin against the traditional wisdom to ill-treat the
dead person.’ (Cited in Bourke, Angela, The Burning of Bridget Cleary. A True Story, Penguin Books,
2001, p. 163) Curiously, in the same passage, Yeats’s informant – who was acquainted with the fairies –
calls such acts of unreasonable violence ‘superstition’ (‘They are so superstitious in Tipperary.’) It appears
that there are gradations of both skepticism and belief which the symbolic system of traditional belief is
able to accommodate.

80
language) to a functional explanation (similar to what we would describe today as fate,
for instance) to superstitious dread that the fairies
132
might be overhearing. Once again,
the important thing is to find out the cause of a belief. In the case of the widespread
conviction that fairies have the ability to punish certain misdeeds, for example, one might
deduce a pragmatic code of traditional ethics whereby the individual is disciplined by the
community; as Bourke is careful to point out, children and women in particular were
targets of such disciplining efforts.
133

Often, these so-called beliefs have the pragmatic functions of speech acts (such as
commands or prohibitions) as Sir William Wilde notes about the popular belief in the
pooca. Indeed, he laments the fact that a traditional belief should have become abstracted
into a pragmatic dietary consideration. Darby, a local informant, is aware of this cultural
shift which the onset of modern life has brought into the countryside: ‘Sure the children
wouldn’t know anything about the pooca but for the story of the blackberries after
Michaelmas.’
In other instances, fairy belief was used to rationalize certain phenomena or to help
cope emotionally with unpleasant or tragic events. From a broader perspective, the
‘fairies were associated with everything that was being swept away by modernity.’
134
The
symbolic richness of the belief system could be easily miscognized and written off by the

132
Also euphemistically known as “the good people”, “the others”, “the royal gentry”, “them”, “gentle
folk”, “wee folk”, “little people”; the person taken by them is said to be “away”.

133
Irish Popular Superstitions, p. 14. The popular belief – as Sir Wilde explains – was ‘kept up probably to
prevent children eating them when over ripe’. The pooca ‘defiles the blackberries at Michaelmas and
Holly-eve.’

134
Bourke, Angela, The Burning of Bridget Cleary. A True Story, Penguin Books, 2001, p. 56.

81
disbelieving journalist as mere superstition. To the outsider, the beliefs of the peasantry
constituted ‘a code he did not fully understand.’
135
The labeling of a belief system which
possesses a complex symbolical apparatus ‘gives them [the Irish peasants] no credit for
humor or imagination...’ since the handy label “superstition” underestimates the
versatility of fairy belief. Bourke’s description of the life of a small rural Irish community
offers a glimpse into a hybrid culture which can accommodate ‘a plurality of
ideologies.’
136
Modernity and tradition jostle each other as the main protagonists feel
pulled by both. It would appear, then, that folklore on the cusp of modernity is a
particularly hybrid phenomenon. For someone like Jack Dunne – the fairy specialist of
the story – the application of traditional cures for fairy abduction was a way of gaining
prestige in the eyes of the community; for someone like Bridget – an independent woman
with a valuable trade who, moreover, knew the ways of the city – the same procedure had
a very different meaning. This means that she would have understood both perspectives.
‘A barrier did exist between metropolitan and vernacular culture, but certain individuals
moved freely across it.’
137
Evidently, the folk – who are supposedly stuck in their
superstitions – could entertain both belief and unbelief together at the same time. Thus a
statement like ‘They are so superstitious in Tipperary’
138
shows the capacity of the folk to
frame their own belief and see it from a critical distance. Sometimes, this distance is

135
Ibid., p. 70.

136
Ibid., p. 154.

137
Ibid., p. 185.

138
Cf. note 131 above.
82
expressed as nostalgia as in Sir William Wilde’s Irish Popular Superstitions where an
Irish peasant bemoans the disappearance of the old beliefs: ‘The good people are leaving
us fast…’
139
Here ‘modern utilitarianism’ is portrayed as an evil which sweeps away
ancient customs.
140

***
The universal-vs-local split is a bit more excusable as a theoretical worry but is
unfortunately so over-emphasized that it should long have exhausted its currency.
141
For
one thing, before positing a distinction between local and universal, one had better really
stay local. Jumping to the speculative (and really quite far-fetched) concern with an
author’s supposedly high-minded strategy of the universalization – within literature – of
the local betrays an inability to stay with the local. And yet, stay is what modernists
themselves did. Witness, for instance, Lorca’s enthusiasm about the uniqueness of
Granadinian culture or Yeats’s tireless emphasis on the difference between Irish and
English fairies. Indeed, the desire to merge with the folk, to be an insider, to inhabit the
clearing, makes the connoisseur of local culture draw ever finer distinctions in local
geography. ‘Of Sleive-league I know nothing’, Yeats almost proudly avers. ‘It was far
out of my beat. My forebears and relations have lived near Rosses and Columkille these
many years. Northward I am wholly a stranger, and can find nothing.’ But to compensate

139
Irish Popular Superstitions, p. 13. Sir Wilde’s introduction is typical of the nostalgic folklorist who
hastens to rescue disappearing traditions: ‘all the stories about the fairies and the pishogues are going fast,
and will soon be lost to us and our heirs forever.’ (Irish Popular Superstitions, p. 14)

140
Ibid., p. 34.

141
Michael Bell is one of the more high-minded exponents of this strain of analysis; cf. Literature,
Modernism and Myth, pp 41 ff.

83
for this strangeness up north, local belonging, including ancestral credentials, ‘will loosen
these cautious tongues’
142
on home turf. In Yeats’s case, the zestful emphasis on the local
is nowhere more clear than in the deliberate regularity with which he uses and sometimes
invents names of geographical locations.
***
So let us believe with the folk, regardless of what is believable and what not; let us
pretend that we are in the house of the folk even if it is made out of candy floss; let us
stay there before we start charting outgoing paths in all directions leading to universality.
Folklore has been much misunderstood, and it has been the task of both folklorists and
literary scholars working with folklore to clear up the misunderstandings. Some of the
usual adjectives associated with folklore include: pre-logical, primitive, plebeian, naïve,
savage, fabricated, simple, redundant
143
, etc.
144
The famous folklorist Dan Ben Amos’s

142
W. B. Yeats. Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth, p. 49.

143
Maranda, Pierre and Elli Maranda, Structural Analysis of Oral Tradition, University of Pennsylvania
Press: Philadelphia, 1971, p. 236: ‘Folk songs are far more redundant than folk tales. In effect, not only do
they recur in steady functional relation to the people’s life, not only are their texts composed of stock
literary devices, favored subject matters, and so forth, but they are also redundant in intonation patterns
(phrases), accent patterns (meter), structural patterns (musical form), and vocalization patterns (vocal
timbre). Thus, folk songs may be recognized in the discourse of a culture simply because they are more
redundant at more levels than any other form of utterance.’ But this redundancy goes hand in hand with the
opposite tendency – sparseness. What we get is redundancy-in-sparseness where familiar topics show up in
distilled form and we only get the tip of the iceberg – a Delphic/distilled pronouncement. The specialized
language, the formulas, the stock intonation, etc. are a mere sign of only the folk knows what. In the same
way that there is so much between the lines in the conversations of a Jane Austen novel, not everything
gets verbalized in the folkloric “text”. Indeed, the Delphic component is present to a much greater extent in
folklore, as the tradition and its pattered attitudes and functions, the collective memory of its past settings
and performed contexts, the voices of its distinguished star performers, inform the new text and permeate it
with a ghostly presence. Gradually, one begins to hear the tradition with its own vibe and rhythm as it
inhabits, subtly or more overtly, the folkloric text.

144
Cf. Carvalho-Neto, Paul, The Concept of Folklore, tras. by Jacques Wilson, University of Miami Press:
Coral Gables, Florida, 1971. Some of the scholarship is so stuck in these assumptions that it often
concludes that any folklore which does not square with one of the adjectives must not be real folklore.
84
response to the purported simplicity of folklore is a typical rhetorical strategy on the part
of the academic folklorist who wishes re-instate folklore on an equal footing with
literature: ‘The simplicity of folklore is in the eyes of the foreign beholder.’
145
While it
may be true that the complexity of much of folklore is absolutely overwhelming, that its
sophistication is, if anything, excessive and extreme, the reactionary attribution of
simplicity to the eye and ear of the “foreigner” only passes the buck to another stage of
the production-reception chain. It marks the non-receptive outsider as an ignoramus but
forgets that the outsider is someone who has only second-hand access, through
stereotypes and hear-say, to the real thing. Instead of removing the stereotype, it
recapitulates it, this time on the level of audience response. But it might be instructive to
note that the outsider has simply never heard (of) the complexities of folklore.
A. P. Evgenieva’s attempt to reclaim folklore is another standard response to the stigma
which the term folklore often carries. ‘The difference between oral poetry and everyday
speech is in that the language of oral compositions is the language of literature, the
language of art, a choice language which is worked out, distilled, ironed out.’
146
But the
need to make it like literature tends to ignore some of the essential features of folklore as

Hence, it is easy for an analyst of nationalism to assume that a folklore used by upper classes or for
superstratal purposes (i.e. non-plebeian) must be a fabrication/social construction/invention. For the literary
scholar, inasmuch as a modernist’s work is “artful” (masterful, non-naïve) it cannot be folklore.

145
Bascom, William ed., Frontiers of Folklore, AAAS Selected Symposium 5, Published by Westview
Press: Boulder, Colorado, 1977, p. 43.

146
In Bakhtina, V. A. and V. M. Gatsak eds, Folklore in the Modern World. Aspects and Directions for
Research, Nauka: Moscow, 1991, p. 65, ‘Отличие язьiка устной поэзии от обиходной разговорной
речи говора в том, что язьiк устной произведений – это язьiк художественной, литературьi, язьiк
искусства, следовательно, язьiк отобранньiй, вьiработанньiй, отшлифованньiй.’

85
it is distinguished from literature. To privilege terms like art, literariness, etc. is to ignore
the simple fact that folklore is an alternative current running sometimes parallel to,
sometimes across, the literary tradition. It is true that the language of folklore is ‘worked
out, distilled, ironed out’, etc. But this does not automatically make it the language of
“art”. Rather, this is the language of the folkloric tradition which, like art, can distill,
work out, etc.
147
What this often means is that when a bit of folklore is borrowed and
imported into a literary work, what is really imported is a finished, a cultivated, product
with its own latent meaning which explodes/precipitates/gives off its flavor within the
borrowed text. It is not a literary item introduced into a consanguineous system which
partakes of similar qualities. It is a thorn in the flesh, a prickly rose – both a blessing and
a curse.
Folklore in literature
One hopes that folklore is not literature. But what exactly is the place of folklore in
literary works? How can analytical tools imported from the science of folkloristics help
with literary analysis of modernist poetry? What are interpenetrative dynamics when the
two systems collide into each other? What does it mean for a poem to contain a bit if
folklore; how containable is folklore; is not the poem asking to be contained within the
larger folkloric tradition?

147
The vicissitudes through which the distilled folkloric artifact has to go, the long historical and sometimes
geographic loop it has to complete, ensure its tested nature and sturdy character. In their ground-breaking
work, Folk Song: U. S. A., John and Alan Lomax explain the multi-stage process of the formation of the
folk song: ‘So folk song grows in small steps, with every slight change tested for audience reaction, thereby
achieving a permanence in man’s affection matched only by the greatest art. This art lives on the lips of the
multitude and is transmitted by the grapevine …’ (Cited in Bluestein, Gene, The Voice of the Folk. Folklore
and American Literary Theory, University of Michigan Press, 1972, p. 109). It appears that the grapevine is
not only a distortion of signal but a chiseling of the corners, a polishing of the gem that is the folk song.
86
The difficulty in pinpointing a folkloric trace within a literary work is that this sort of
influence is not something you corroborate – it is there unannounced, like a ghost who
owns the habitation it haunts. Thus, the embeddedness of folkloric items such as motifs,
themes, stylistic formulas, etc., is a very different thing from the less easily traceable yet
patently palpable haunting presence of the folkloric tradition – which is precisely not
embedded in that it always stands apart. Even when it enters literature, it is still quite
separate; hovering over the poem, it oversees the poem. For instance, the tradition of
personal story-telling in a culture, with all its specifications and expectations and
fulfillments, informs, as Sandra Stahl has shown, the individual product which is the
personal story.
148
One simply hears the tradition without specifically hearing it. And what
is true of the permeating presence of the tradition in such an atypical folkloric genre as
the personal narrative is even more true in the case of the folk song.
An interesting record remains of an Irish debate regarding the strategies of
appropriating folklore for literary purposes.
149
This discussion is exemplary in that it
starts with the possibility of incorporating specific folkloric items (e.g. Irish place names)
and ends up insisting on the idea that literary work consists in the careful distillation of
qualities taken from folklore. Once again, it is the spirit and not the letter which gains the
upper hand.

148
Stahl, Literary Folkloristics and the Personal Narrative, Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1989.

149
Eglinton, John, W. B. Yeats, A. E., and W. Larminie, eds, Literary Ideals in Ireland, (Reprint of the
1899 ed. published by T. F. Unwin, London), Lemma Publishing Corporation: New York, 1973.

87
John Eglinton (in ‘What Should be the Subjects of National Drama?’) asked if mythical
stories of ancient Irish heroes could be a viable subject of national drama. Should one
look for a subject in the folklore of the peasantry? Folklore would give ‘simplicity, hope,
belief, and an absolute originality like that of Wordsworth.’
150
Eglinton imagines that
literature ‘would migrate to a quiet country like Ireland, where there is no great tradition
to be upset or much social sediment to be stirred’. So the center of originality is displaced
from the familiar European centers to the periphery while literature borrows fresh
material from the folk. ‘What Renan says, in speaking of the Jews, that “ a nation whose
mission it is to revolve in its bosom spiritual truths is often weak politically,” may be
used with regard to Ireland as an argument that at least nothing stands in its way in this
direction.’ Eglinton’s idea is that ‘political stagnation and feebleness’ is ‘actually
favorable to some original manifestation in the world of ideas.’
151

Apart from the usual argumentative employment, so typical of the nineteenth century,
of national characteristics, what is interesting about Eglinton’s view is its open admission
that folkloric materials are resistant and not easily appropriable. His intriguing conclusion
is that one must willingly subject oneself to this material – then only can one get a
glimpse of the ‘forgotten mythopeoic secret’.
The truth is, these subjects [i.e. ancient legends of Ireland], much as we may
admire them and regret that we have nothing equivalent to them in modern
world, obstinately refuse to be taken up out of their old environment and be
transplanted into the world of modern sympathies. The proper mode of treating
them is a secret lost with the subjects themselves… we must go to them rather

150
Ibid., p. 10.

151
Ibid., pp 10-11.

88
than expect them to come to us, studying them as closely as possible, and
allowing them to influence us as they may.
152

Yeats, who would have agreed that ‘we must go to them’, countered passionately, if
vaguely, that the recalcitrance of the folkloric material paradoxically meant a capacity for
transplantation. The wonder of first things, as in a primitive encounter with a new object,
was the same wonder one experienced upon discovery of Irish folklore. This spark could
itself lend a crucial quality to the literary work provided that the magnetism of the impact
was, as it were, naively smuggled into the new version of the traditional story, legend or
folk song. The modernizing author’s role is therefore to write a new variant text and thus
expand the tradition pretending that adaptability is not an issue. ‘The Irish legends, in
popular tradition an in old Gaelic literature, are more numerous, and as beautiful as the
Norse and German legends, and alone among great European legends have the beauty
and wonder of altogether new things,’ Yeats enthused in ‘A Note on National Drama’.
153

A haunting dimension of the material is almost a necessity in this particular version of
Yeats’s defense of folkloric materials. Not only is it possible to transplant ancient
material, but its transplantability is a given. Yeats goes on, in 19th century etymological
fashion, to argue that a feeling of wonder and holiness is to be created simply by virtue of
using place names which automatically trigger an aura of sanctified history. A place
name comes with its own history; the ‘emotion of the place’ haunts its name and the
narrative which uses that name; a ‘dreamy beauty’ will necessarily accrue to the text as

152
Ibid., pp 11-12.

153
Ibid., p. 19.

89
the connotations of place names persist. What assures a successful bridge between
ancient and modern (without losing the mythopoeic sense of wonder) is, in Yeats’s
example with place names, a direct importation of folk material. Like a word with a long
history of usage, the folkloric item carries its own necessary original/etymological
shadow.
154

Eglinton’s reply to Yeats’s riposte is that ‘characters and situations become entirely
new creations by virtue of the new spirit and import which he [the poet] puts into
them’.
155
In other words, if a literature is to be representative and national, it must register
the facts of contemporary national life, and a poet cannot do that if he adopts a view of
art as an escape into ancient sources and a movement away from the nitty-gritty of
contemporary reality. The hint in Eglinton’s argument is that Yeats is that kind of
escapist poet. But Eglinton’s premise is that ‘the mode of treating them [ancient sources]
as they exist in tradition is a lost secret’, i.e. one simply cannot go back to the spirit of the
original material, one cannot go back to the source.
Yeats’s argumentative strategy in ‘John Eglinton and Spiritual Art’
156
is precisely to
refute Eglinton’s premise that ‘these subjects refuse to be taken up out of their old
environment, and be transplanted into the world of modern sympathies. The proper mode

154
J. M. Synge seems to have espoused a similar view on place-names. When Lady Gregory advised him to
remove place-names from his book about the Aran Islands (because that would lend the book ‘a curious
dreaminess’), Synge refused to follow her advice. Curiously, the concrete place-name contributes to,
instead of detracting from, the dreamy aura of both Yeats and Synge’s mythopoeic writing (cf. Robin
Skelton’s J. M. Synge and his world, The Viking Press: New York, 1971, p. 59).

155
Ibid., p. 24.

156
Pp. 31 ff.

90
of treating them is a secret lost with the subjects themselves.’ Yeats responds with what
looks like an encomium to aesthetic transcendentalism:
I believe that the renewal of belief, which is the great movement of our time,
will more and more liberate the arts from “their age” and from life [i.e. from
the mere facts of life] and leave them more and more free to lose themselves in
beauty, and to busy themselves, like all the great poetry of the past and like
religions of all times, with “old faiths, myths, dreams”, the accumulated beauty
of the age. I believe that all men will more and more reject the opinion that
poetry is “a criticism of life”, and be more and more convinced that it is a
revelation of a hidden life.
157

Yeats also arrives at a Wordsworthian notion of a poetic ‘exaltation of the senses’. The
important thing is not whether one borrows from legendary or unlegendary material, or if
one treats this material in an archaic or modern way. The importance is in the ‘volume
and intensity of its [the poetry’s] passion.’ Hurt into argument, Yeats seems to forget his
initial idea about place names. But we can combine his statements, and what we get is the
capacity of real/contemporary place names (and of folk materials in general) to function
as a door to the past and in this way create a kind of mythopeoic double consciousness.
Also, and most crucial of all, is the idea of reaching a state of exultation in the
performance of the folkloric material. This leads us to Yeats’s lifelong concern with
giving voice to the magic power of folklore by staging his own poetry and drama within
the framework of a folk-style enactment.
Eglinton – in ‘Mr Yeats and Popular Poetry’ – takes the discussion back to the basic
premise: the transplantability of archaic material. Once again, he stresses the resistance
of the material. Eglinton is also aware of the temptation to simply slap new elements onto

157
Ibid., p. 36.

91
the texture of the archaic source. This impulse to kitsch is a lure which should not be
underestimated.
When a great legend or narrative comes down to us from antiquity – as, for
instance, the Biblical story of David – it does so in a certain form, the form in
which it has spontaneously clothed itself, and which fits it as the body fits the
soul. No one could improve upon the story of David, unless, by a miracle, he
could introduce some new and transforming element into his conception of it. In
like manner, the Irish legends have come down to us in a certain form and
language, proper to the riginal conception of them, and they can only be made to
live again by something new added to them out of the author’s age and
personality.
158

As an instance of such a successful hybrid, Eglinton gives Milton’s Samson. Milton’s
hero is an expression of his age and it is in this sense that Milton’s work is “original”. In
Eglinton’s conception, original means origin-based yet new. Once again, in this reply,
Eglinton assumes the posture of ‘simple politeness toward those dreamers who walk with
their head in a cloud of vision’ (42-3). Curiously, Eglinton goes concrete on Yeats and
invites him and his likes not to take the issue of transplantability so literally. The customs
and manner of ancient life, as Homer treated them are buried in the past but today, a
Homeric treatment of contemporary life with its electric tramcars, labor-saving
contrivances, the kinematograph, etc., is possible by recreating the epic wonder of Greek
poetry, except this time the wonder is supplied by the ‘visionary suggestiveness’ of
objects taken directly from the scientific age. The steam-engine, the phonograph, the
dynamo are ‘themselves the poetry’.
159
Eglinton’s statement, with its futuristic tang, is in

158
Ibid., pp 41-2.

159
Curiously, Yeats himself would achieve a type of visionary concreteness in his later “political” poems
with their Zeppelins and lists of proper names which are meant to sound with an aura of heroic
suggestiveness.
92
many ways the typical reply to the out-of-place dreamer in the age of concrete poetry.
The charge (especially typical in aesthetic debates in modernizing peripheral cultures) of
decadence and ‘abnormality’
160
is designed as final nail in the coffin of “ideal” school of
poetry.
A.E.’s contribution to the debate
161
may not have settled the dispute, but it shows how
deeply committed Irish modernists were to the idea of dreaming back to the origin of
Irish folklore.
Folkloristics and the study of literature
Many lessons relevant to literary analysis can be drawn from the methods of
folkloristics. Roger Abrahams, in his essay ‘Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of
Folklore’ for the ground-breaking symposium of 1977
162
, prescribes a way of viewing
folklore which is valid for literary works, especially dramatic and poetic, which owe a
debt to folklore. ‘Enactments: heightened events experienced in such anticipated and
conventionally framed ways that participation is both potentiated and encouraged.

160
Ibid., p. 45.

161
‘Literary Ideals in Ireland’, pp 49 ff.

162
Abrahams, Roger, ‘Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of Folklore’ in Frontiers of Folklore, AAAS
Selected Symposium 5, Westview Press: Boulder, Colorado, 1977, pp 79-120. In his introduction to the
book, William Bascom, editor, sounds an almost revolutionary note: ‘In recent years there have been new
developments in the study of folklore, and it is in the belief that many of our colleagues in other fields may
not be aware of them that this symposium has been arranged.’ The new developments in question are 1) an
expansion of the definition of the folk which allowed more scope for study and 2) a performance-centered
theory of folklore – i.e. a movement away from motif and structure and more into things like enactment and
immediate performance context. By now, 2009, the idea of performance has become commonplace but at
that time few people in the other departments were riding that particular wave.

93
Activities become unreal yet more real at the same time.’
163
What is particularly
interesting and important is the ‘introduction of the concepts of the performative and the
indexical’
164
. A folk performance is indexical inasmuch as the parameters of the
enactment have a long history which is an essential part of the meaning of the basic
components of the performance. A circle dance is not only a dance arranged in a circle
with a specific step to a predictable tune, etc. Over and above this, it includes shouts of
encouragement and approval, specific “moves” such as gestures, it follows a specific
routine, etc. These extra components have indexical meaning – they often seem random
and are too subtle or simply unnoticeable for someone not familiar with their meaning.
They are a like a noise that we do not realize we are hearing – but once we are asked to
direct our attention to it, we know it has been there all along. Much of folklore is like this.
***
The burden of tradition (a kind of pleasurable anxiety of influence) hangs like an
albatross around the performer’s neck. In flamenco, one is always in time – a compás.
And it is customary, especially for novice performers to imagine the flamenco police
breathing in their neck, always ready to jump at the slightest deviation from the strict
rules handed down by tradition. But it is these rules which allow guitar, shoe, clapping
hand and voice to be all together in one zone, in one dimension, in one time – even
without previous rehearsal.
165
The burden of previous performances, palpably felt by

163
‘Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory’, p. 81.

164
Ibid., p. 116.

165
For an extended discussion of flamenco performance, see chapter three.
94
anyone wishing to step in the chain of a folkloric genre’s history places the performer
squarely among an imaginary cloud of witnesses. The tradition is somehow in the air not
only because it is often unrecorded but because it implacably asks for its instantiation
with each folkloric act. It would be strange for a modernist to slap the name of folklore to
his or her work and at the same shirk the exciting opportunity to carry this lively albatross.
Even innovation which willfully challenges the tradition (and, pace Hobsbawm et al., one
had better speak of innovation than invention) has to be in dialog (if not necessarily in
step all the time) with the tradition in order to have the status of something more than a
slipshod triviality. At least this is so in the judgment of the albatross.
***
All the literary modernists studied here (Irish, Spanish and Bulgarian) prove the point
that the role of folklore was crucial on both the individual level and on the level of
culture. As the discussion of accelerated development showed, folklore was crucial for
Bulgarian and Irish cultures which were both searching for answers in the context of
building their own national literatures. Far from being a mere motif, a kind of ready-to-
hand material to be used at will, folklore was a powerful dynamo driving cultural
development. Within the field of literature, the result was a crop of high-minded, albeit
idiosyncratic, modernist works of which even the most experimental, as in the case of
Geo Milev’s expressionist poetry, were indebted to a folkloric legacy.
Thus, folklore was not simply an item that was to be reframed within a larger literary
work – it was itself the framework which would drive culture forward. Following the
logic of Irish, Spanish and Bulgarian modernists, one may even ascribe an agency to
95
folklore as a body of knowledge; one may go as far as imagining that the life-cycles of
folklore – much larger than those of the literary and other traditions – are well-
orchestrated survival strategies which happen to recruit cultural mechanisms and trends
(such as revivals), political agendas (e.g. nationalism), and rival discourses (literature,
music).
All the while folklore plays possum. The lure of folklore often gets translated as
paranoia in the face of its possible discontinuation. The poet/folklorist rushes to save
folklore from oblivion. In such a context, to preserve one's culture (a 19th as well as a
20th century concern in the three cultures studied here
166
) is to act as a care-taker. And
yet, it seems that the discontinuity is only in the eye of the beholder; folklore, instead of
dying, lives one more life, morphs into the next new thing, borrows new clothes, and thus
works out its own salvation. Often, this looks like a miracle. Herder, for instance, was
amazed that the folk song continued its tiny life in peripheral cultures against all odds and
in the face of untold vicissitudes. He wondered how folklore got such resilience.
The worry that the present moment is the time of twilight when folklore is on the verge
of disappearing coexists side by side with the folkloric tradition's self-aware display of
persistence and its self-assured confidence in its own survival. Perversely, folklore laughs
at its own death, stages its own burial. But it does this only in jest! It is not very clear that

166
In the case of Spain, the work of a whole generation of Spanish literati working within the framework of
‘modernismo’ (a modernism before European modernism) staged a massive revival project which was a
return to popular culture. Figures such as the Machados were instrumental in the revivification of folk
traditions for literary purposes. The literary appropriation of folklore had its counterpart in the field of
music. The revival of folk traditions was central to the project of Spanish composers such as Albébiz, de
Falla, Turina and others.
96
the literary tradition simply makes use of the ever-disappearing tradition of folklore. It is
not clear who co-opts whom.
As Irish, Spanish and Bulgarian modernisms show, literary authors consciously strive
to encrypt themselves in the folkloric tradition. To see them as simply using folk
materials is to assume that the process of co-option works easily only in one direction.
But if folklore is seen as a mighty attraction which dissolves modernists' individualities,
then it is folklore which might be doing the co-option. Threatening to disappear,
dissimulating its death in order to attract the services of concerned modernists, folklore
assures its long-lived minor status – a surprisingly subtle move coming from an
anonymous, amorphous, inanimate mass.
In the Irish debate referred to above, AE, like Yeats, introduces a red herring in his
attempt to reconcile the differences between the disputants. He ends up restating Yeats’s
view with a slightly different wording: there is a core of truth persisting in ancient
materials – in that sense, ancient materials can and should be used in modern treatments
of eternal truths such as beauty, heroism and spirituality. We can look back and see the
unchanging image, the steady symbol, which is ‘more potent than history’.
167
Materials
such as these are ready to hand, lying within easy reach since they are close to our heart
as well as being part of the common store of cultural memory. Ancient ideals are as
contemporary to us as electric cars. The important distinction, then, is not whether
materials are archaic or modern since they all exist synchronically in the communal
memory. It is not a question of then vs now. Rather, it is a question of ‘there’ vs ‘here’.

167
Literary Ideals, p. 51.

97
The space of there is for AE the mind of the poet. This ‘there’ is the heightened state of
poetic/exalted passion. The true home of the seer is there. In the mind of the ecstatic poet,
the images get liberated from the burden of historical accuracy and achieve a magical
power. Thus, the mythopoeia of poetic modernism forged in the space of there attempts
to really sound the folkloric material, to listen to its lost cadence, to follow its tune. What
Eglinton, in reference to Yeats’s poetic folklorism, had called a ‘quaint rhythmic trick’ is,
for, AE, ‘a mnemonic by which the poet records, though it be but an errant and faltering
tune, the inner music of life.’
168

***
Other important lessons which folklore has to offer will be brought up in their proper
place in the four studies of individual authors which follow. Chapter One (‘Dialectism’)
examines the ways in which modernists forge an “original” language using folk speech. I
examine the hybrid English of J. M. Synge via the prism of second language acquisition,
particularly the concept of inter-language. Chapter Two (‘Poetic Folklorism’) studies
Yeats’s theories of performance, or what I call Yeats’s act, as well as his theoretical
writings and his theories of performing poetry and drama. I look closely at his
performative vision centered in the speaking of verse to musical notes. Chapter Three
(‘Vernacularism’) mixes the soccer chant – a vernacular poetic genre as well as an
example of urban folklore – with Geo Milev’s poem September. It is an audio-print
experiment in sounding expressionist poetry. I also examine Garcia Lorca’s aesthetic
theories and their debt to a vernacular vision as well as his work with the lullaby and

168
Ibid., p. 54.
98
cante jondo. I have presented excerpted audio examples as well as a modicum of original
work in the CD accompanying the dissertation (I have used widely available software, viz.
CoolEditPro). As far as the close readings of poems are concerned, the emphasis has been
on sound and performance. This is the case with all the major poets studied here. Some of
my transcriptions of poems may look a little strange. In order to sound the material
properly, I have had to resort to experimental transcription, translation, transliteration,
and other acoustic aids.

99
black English
green English
rotten English
weird English
junk English
forbidden English
Spanglish
Kinglish
Queenglish
Hindglish
Chinglish
pig English
non-standard delphic
queer diseased
dialectal abnormal
oral mythic
cant oracular
vernacular

Adamic
Edenic
Hebraic
Aryan
Gaelicized
Saxonized
Latinate
Italian
Africanized Argot
Tuscan Patois
Northumbrian Pidgin
Dorset Creole
Scots Notts
Outlaw Ebonic Hybrid
Variant Macaronic fused
Bastard l mixed
illegitimate a illiterate
n
mongrel ized – h-y-p-h-e-n-a-t-ed ________ O
submerged i
f i x g
ORIGINAL n e e
substrated subaltern u d r
100
Chapter 1: Dialectism

Standard, Non-standard, Sub-standard
Modernist Dialectism
Literary Language as Inter-language
Translational Aesthetics
Dialects of Paradise
Tongues of the Common Folk
Dialect as Folklore

I remember my first year of English and the Negro spirituals in the once-a-week music
class: …’cause if mah lawd would a’ call’ on me, I would not be ready to die… This was
education through song. Waid in da waatuh/ weeeyd in da waaatah-R-‘n’-bee
baptized…I so was immersed in the standard that baptism of any other sort was out of the
question. We, the rank of file the super-elite English Language Gymnasium, were all so
in the thick of the British standard. Who would have thought that a dialect current was
running right alongside it; thus, when I predictably misheard the would ’a called, I
preferred, through a process of hypercorrection, to err on the side of caution by making
up the standard-looking word acall by analogy to await, astride, ajar, etc. No amount of
Negro spirituals managed to avert the gaze from the intrusive standard.
169
Yet, on
occasion, I would purposefully intersperse my essays with irregular forms just to test if
they actually existed. Apart from such desultory instances of non-conformity, the target
remained the Standard RP during this period of unparalleled immersion. My dreams were
another matter: they followed the logic of what can be described as unfettered linguistic

169
Cf. the perfectly placed “intrusive R”. Even if, in this phrase, it is not exactly uncalled for (unlike cases
such as ‘Asia-R-and-Africa’ where it really is intrusive), the conviction with which it was sung betrayed a
dedication to the British intrusive R – i.e. to a standardized non-standard formation.
101
abandon. Non-existent vocabulary caterpillars would slowly parade themselves floating
in the air, wait provocatively to be chopped up into prefix : root : suffix, and then speed
off like comets into the black hole of the unspelled. The dream-work consisted in
constructing a parallel world which deviated from correct usage. Deviant language is the
subject of this chapter.
This is the kind of language the folk speaks. And poets often follow in the folk’s
footsteps. One of the most underestimated qualities of the folk is its capacity to blaze new
trails. The accomplished craft of its complex strategies of survival has served as a primer
in poetics to modernists of various denominations no less than to practitioners from other
periods in the history of literature. In cultures just awaking or renewing themselves,
folklore and its language play a particularly important role. When faced by stylistic
dilemmas, poets often look to the folk for guidance. This is especially true in situations
where there seems to be no literary tradition, in post-revolutionary (including post-
colonial) contexts, and at times of political change more generally.
It is hard not to be at least vaguely aware of the voice of the street at these dramatic
historical junctures; and then, subtly, the crowd’s voice worms its way into the inner ear.
From a noise in the distance, it transforms itself into a signifying sound. You catch this
meaning cadence with a slight delay: it sounds a new note, and then you know that the
crowd had been meaning something all along. Whether it expresses the sensibility of the
day in its purportedly naïve fashion or comments on the action with the seasoned
skepticism of a Greek chorus, its sing-song distant voice exposes established meanings
for what they are – a parade of catchy slogans written in larger than life letters which, if
102
we still lived in the old Communist times, we would sing automatically on marching days.
But I have been describing an angry post-communist crowd; a crowd which is also
perhaps unrealistically well-organized and univocal. And of course the voice need not
always express discontent: undercurrents of crazed joyfulness, witty repartee, and slap-
happy poeticality arising from sheer exhaustion complement the spectrum of
expressiveness even on the most gruesome occasions.
Walking in a tight crowd on a narrow street, carried and pushed lightly by the
pedestrian bottleneck, a person becomes fleet of foot. He or she is carried by the crowd.
In similar fashion, a poet may be carried by the folk so that literature turns out to be the
creation of imaginative works which follow in the footsteps of the folk’s imagination. J.
M. Synge’s idea of collaboration as an act of borrowing from the popular imagination
allows the folk to come into its own as a driving impulse behind what is considered
Synge’s most modernist play. In his Preface to the Playboy he broaches the subject of
dramatic language, criticizing Ibsen and Zola for ‘dealing with the reality of life in
joyless and pallid words’
170
. For Synge a play must have both reality and joy. He thought
the Playboy was a celebration of the language of the Irish and hence a tribute to the
people:
In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and
such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among the people who
have shut their lips on poetry. In Ireland, for a few years more, we have a
popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us
who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where

170
Synge, J. M., The Works of J. M. Synge. Volume Two, John W. Luce and Company: Boston, 1912, p. vi.

103
the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory
only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.
171

What Synge asserts here is that Irish writers had the fortune not to have to start from
scratch in their attempt to forge a new mode of expression (which would be different
from what was fashionable in England) but to ride the crest of a wave of local tradition.
The Irish people had done what the African folk would later do for the Afro-Caribbean
writer. In both cases, local traditions give the author a unique chance to start:
The place African Caribbean writers occupy is one that is unique, and one that
forces the writer to operate in a language that was used to brutalize and diminish
Africans so that they would come to a profound belief in their own lack of
humanity. No language can accomplish this – and to a large degree English did –
without itself being profoundly affected, without itself being
tainted …Subversion…began when the African…through alchemical
practices…succeeded in transforming the leavings and detritus of a language and
infused it with her own remembered linguistic traditions…
172

Like the Afro-Caribbean author, the writers of the Irish Literary Renaissance were facing
the issue of the transformation of culture and language through the use of a medium
which was alien to that culture. In Ireland the question was: can the English language
express Irish essence? The Irish renaissance authors turned to a precedent in folk-life
173

171
Ibid., p. vii.

172
Ahmad, Dohra, Rotten English. A Literary Anthology, W.W. Norton & Company: New York, London,
2007, p. 493.

173
Peripheral to their own class, Anglo-Irish authors like Yeats and Synge wrote, as it were, on the edge of
their own minority perimeter. In a sense, their turn to the folk was natural. Where were they to turn if they
wished to escape, physically or imaginatively or both, from their class: certainly not to the middle class
(with its greasy till). Thus the burden of the déclassé, led them to produce a hybrid, un-classed,
unclassifiable, non-standard, literature. Seán Ó Tuama puts this turn to local tradition in a wider context:
towards the end of the nineteenth century, he explains, there was ‘considerable mingling of the Irish and
Anglo-Irish [cultural] traditions.’ Just as the Irish underclass was becoming more and more Anglicized, the
Anglo-Irish themselves felt cut adrift and moving ever farther from their ties to the English mother-culture
and began to identify more and more with ‘the older Irish culture.’ (‘Synge and the Idea of a National
104
since the Irish folks themselves had grappled with the same issue – and had invented a
solution.
Standard, Non-standard, Substandard
A “Standard” is an abstract measure. Literary scholars commenting on dialect often
point to the standard as only a privileged dialect, usually tied to a region or social stratum.
This does not seem to me to be the case: it is not that one erstwhile dialect was chosen to
act as a prestige language used by officialdom and by those who want to show their ties
to a literate social stratum. Rather, the standard is a generalization, an abstraction, a
flavorless middle ground where all speakers meet. In Bulgaria, to talk in the official
standard is to keep close to the written language. Spoken English, which is much farther
removed from the written to begin with, may fit the definition of standard as a chosen
dialect a little better; but it is still misleading to think of it in these terms since a dialect
has its own qualities which the standard simply lacks. It is not that the standard differs
from all other dialects in the fact that it has prestige. Rather, it lacks – it has never
possessed – a dialectal nature. The dialectal is the flavorful; it has certain objective
qualities which the standard was precisely intended to deaden. The prestige language is
not like the standard foot which is a foot (say the foot of the governor of an Italian city)
chosen arbitrarily to represent a measure. Standard language is indeed a measure – of
mediocrity, of the conservative middle ground, of tamed vocality, of studious and
uneconomical consonantal labor, of tepid generality and pallid commonness. Its only aim

Literature’ in J. M. Synge. Centenary Papers, ed. Maurice Harmon, The Dolmen Press: Dublin, 1972, pp 1-
17 (pp 2-3))

105
and virtue is that it is designed to avoid ambiguity and to promote comprehension. It is
not tough on the ear. It is by no means easy on the tongue.
While the standard is that annoying administrative thing expressive of no particular
culture, forced down the throat, tied to bureaucratic usage, enforced decorum and prestige,
the non-standard is full of local impact and strong flavor, it tickles the jaded palate and
becomes a slippery slide down the well of linguistic specificity. The possessor of these
rich qualities catches the evil eye of that characterless monstrosity, the Commonness
upon the throne.
174

***
Charles Ferguson describes a socially marked written language used for the purposes of
official communication as a language variety which is ‘superimposed’ and ‘highly
codified (often grammatically more complex)’. He distinguishes this grammatical
abstraction from the language used for ‘ordinary conversation.’
175
The relation between a
‘respected body of written literature’ and the prestige variety he designates as diglossia.
This relation is of course a recurrent historical phenomenon; I will only dwell here on the
role of the standard in the history of modern English, especially as it concerns dialects
and in particular the Irish way of speaking English. In the Irish context, diglossia

174
For Yeats, Edwardian conformity – and, to an extent, Englishness in general – was an example of a tepid
mentality; for the phrase ‘commonness upon the throne’, cf. ‘In the Seven Woods’. Other terms for
Standard English used in Renaissance texts were ‘common’ and ‘general’. But for poets like Yeats, as for
Mallarme and Eliot, it was the ‘the dialect of the tribe’ that provided the material for poetry. It should be
noted that informal speech can be just as standardized or ‘common’ – especially when it is put on to gain
prestige or acceptance. When it becomes a code, it is a great peeve.

175
Ferguson, Charles, ‘Diglossia’, in Language in Culture and Society, ed. Dell Hymes, Harper and Row:
New York: 1964, p. 435.

106
functions, as John Guillory suggests, ‘on the basis of fully distinct languages’ (i.e.
English and Gaelic) where the imperial language is superimposed on the language written
and spoken in the colonized territory.
176
The result was a peculiar bilingual situation
177
,
both traumatic and highly conducive to linguistic experimentation.
Paula Blank traces the history of dialect use for literary purposes during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. At a crucial juncture for the English language, the ways in
which dialects were “constructed” followed the logic of cultural imperialism. In this
context, both Irish English and other local dialects became “colonized” in the dual sense
of being the targets of both exclusion and appropriation. ‘In the Renaissance, it is the
discovery of dialect that turns linguistic inquiry into a question of cultural authority, for
the triumph of the King’s English would depend, in part, on the defeat of alternative
versions of the language.’
178
The practice of ‘linguistic vigilantism’ by standardizers such
as Thomas Harman – the title of whose popular pamphlet A Caveat or Warening for
Commen Cursetors (1576) would probably read now as a dialectal transcription – relied
on a hierarchy of valuation erected on the firm metaphysical ground of linguistic
lawfulness. In the midst of the widely recognized and much celebrated linguistic chaos,
there were, Paula Blank asserts, significant and authoritative attempts to promote the
standard code of the elite by naturalizing its purity, its Englishness, and, above all, its

176
Guillory, John, Cultural Capital. The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, The University of Chicago
Press: Chicago, 1994, p. 69.

177
Guillory rightly points to the fact that diglossia can occur in a bilingual culture; he corrects Ferguson
who claims that diglossia occurs in ‘a relatively stable language situation’. (See Cultural Capital, p. 69)

178
Blank, Paula, Broken English. Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writing, Routledge:
London and New York, 1996, p. 2.

107
superiority to alternative Englishes. Harman’s famous diatribe against the underworld
language of thieves (‘the leud, lousey language of these lewtering luskes and lasy
Lorrels…a unknowen toung onely, but to these bold, beastly, bawdy Beggars, and vaine
Vagabondes’)
179
aims to eliminate linguistic differences and is part of an essentially
poetic and mythico-symbolic standard-mongering project.
180

The myth of the purity and originality of the English language depended on its
shrugging off all adulterations. Prepared in such an unrealistically septic environment, it
could stand on its own feet: strong and pure as the first language. Talk of linguistic
origins, a signature of the 18th and 19th centuries, was, in the logomaniac English
Renaissance, part of the conversation about the necessity for a standard. Alexander Gill,
in his Logonomia Anglica, speculates thus: ‘Since the beginning all men’s lips were
identical, and there existed but one language, it would indeed be desirable to unify the
speech of all peoples…and were human ingenuity to attempt this, certainly no more
suitable language than English could be found.’
181
Gill was of course underestimating the
ingenuity of the folk and the capacity for linguistic variation to endure in a context of
centralization. He was also ignoring the persistent presence of the linguistic substratum –
the dialectal detritus which did not yield to attempts at linguistic unification; this chapter
will examine the success of such efforts and their ironic results.

179
Cited in Blank, p. 19.

180
‘In Renaissance England, no less than Italy or France, language reformers vied for the right to authorize
a language that was, as yet, up for bids; throughout Europe poets took the lead in authoring the mother
tongue.’ (Broken English, p. 31)

181
Cited in Blank, pp 24-5.

108
Enthusiastic standard-bearing easily spread to a wider periphery. As the necessity to
impose a correct language was designed to meet new needs, the theoretical emphasis also
changed. And that put new clothes on the folk, that wooden mannequin figure whose
contours can be filed down or fleshed out on demand. Part of a larger colonial project, the
centralization of language invented the figure of the linguistic recusant. Wallowing in
dialect, the Irish and Welsh in particular, could only contort the English language.
Education and subjugation of this gibberish-speaking folk proceeded hand in hand. The
project of colonization required a necessary further wrinkle. As he crossed the Irish sea or
Hadrian’s wall, his language became a marker of more than just marginal social status:
Despite the participation of these languages in a tradition of early modern
English dialect comedy, the Welsh, Irish, and Scottish of Renaissance literature
speak with a very different cultural accent, and command a very different kind
of attention from their English audiences. For some writers, the broken English
of such speakers was an expression not only of a cultural difference…but of a
racial difference embodied in words.
182

Thus, the making of this linguistically deviant folk served the purposes of Renaissance
authors across the board: from language reformists to carriers of the colonial torch to
writers of literature.
183
Sometimes, the various authorial roles coalesced. If Harman had

182
Broken English, p.130. Representations of dialect in Renaissance English literature – such as we find in
Thomas Dekker’s The Welsh Embassador (1624) or Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597), or
Henry V (1599) – can hardly be called real language; these Anglo-Welsh or Anglo-Irish “languages” are
distinguished, for the most part, by a handful of phonological features.

183
Three Renaissance texts will suffice here: Spenser’s character Irenius, in A View of the Present State of
Ireland, wisely exclaims concerning an Anglo-Irish child’s acquisition of the Irish ‘speech, manners, and
inclination’ from Irish mothers and nurses: ‘So that the speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish’.
For Irenius, the Irish language was the ‘third evil’ which must be restrained.
In his Discourse on Irish Affairs (1577) Philip Sidney thought the Irish prone rather to ‘all filthiness than
any law’. No ‘gentle means’ could ‘put out the fresh remembrance of their lost liberty.’ Since language
carries these memories, it must in turn be extirpated.
Richard Stanyhurst, noted historian, described the Yola dialect spoken in Wexford and Fingall as a
‘mingle mangle, or gallamaufrey of both languages, that have in such medley or checkerwyse so crabbedly
109
wholeheartedly denounced the cant of thieves, Jonson
184
, among others, used it for
creative purposes while perpetuating a racial stereotype. In much of Renaissance
literature, the use of dialect has a dual orientation: it constitutes a racial othering as well
as an opportunity to wallow for pleasure in the folk’s linguistic mire.
185

These metamorphoses of the folk (a laughing stock, a stain on the standard’s
escutcheon, a linguistic libertine-anarchist, a racial other) follow a similar trajectory in
the 19th century where the tendencies towards creative transgression, centralization and
racial stereotyping feed off one another. The age of dictionaries was also the age of
dialect poetry and of speculation on the racial character of languages. If, in the
Renaissance, the folk had given popular pamphlet writers and authors of plays the
opportunity to transgress linguistic norms and gain linguistic capital, if, on the other hand,
it had served as a sitting duck for the wrath of the promoter of linguistic prescriptivism, if,
finally, it had othered, in the eyes of the sympathizer of colonialism, certain provincial

jumbled them both togyther, as commonly the inhabitants of the meaner sort speake netyther good English
nor good Irishe.’ (Cited in Blank, p.148)

184
Cf. The Gypsies Metamorphosed (the masque was first performed in 1621). In Jonson’s masque, the folk
goes from being ‘Ethiop’-dark to English-white through the intercession of the King. Similarly, as Paula
Blank comments, Jonson’s Irish Masque at Court (1613) – with its heavy stage Irish dialect – ‘offers a
dramatic realization of a cultural fantasy that dominated the imagination of so many early modern English
writers: the metamorphosis of Irishmen into Englishmen, the recreation of one nation as another…The
Anglicization of Ireland imagined by [these writers] was nothing less than a fantasy of regeneration not
only of Irishmen but of the English who had “degenerated” into their kind.’ (Cited in Blank, p. 152)

185
The transgressive function of dialect can also be seen as a return to a previous state of the English
language – a time before prescriptivist language politics. Richard Mulcaster in The Elementarie (1582) tells
the story of how English was originally ruled by a tyrant, sound, until ‘consent in use did transport the
authoritie, from sound alone, to reason, custom and sound joyntlie.’(Cited in Blank, p. 25). The project of
dialectal poets, such as the 19th century poet William Barnes, can generally be viewed as one of taking the
English language back to a past time when sound reigned supreme. Instead of the centralizing rule of
reason, language is allowed to reach a natural phonetic equilibrium – sound comes to rest satisfied in
writing. The tyranny of sound echoes Mulcaster’s question-complaint, ‘Why not my ear best?’ (cf. Broken
English, p. 23)
110
folks, in the 19th century, this figure was a central node in speculations about the origin
of language, the genius and character of national languages, the necessity to unify nations
ethnically and linguistically and, once again but with redoubled effect, the civilizing role
of the colonialist project.
Whether thief or savage, Irish or Ruritanian, far Eastern or local peasant, this racial
other – this alien figure – never stopped to distinguish itself by ‘jangling’ in dialect.
186

Modernist Dialectism
Given the prejudice against infiltrants into the standard purity, it is not surprising that
dialect has a bad reputation. Writers who wish to use dialect are keenly aware of the
limitations in working with non-standard varieties. Where the linguistic history is
traumatic, the place of dialects on the hierarchy of cultural valuation is even more
palpably felt by authors. This is true in Ireland as well as in Africa and the Caribbean, for
instance. In response to such a widely popular prejudice against dialect, Kamau
Brathwaite’s strategy is to change the label. In order to overcome the negative
etymological taint which the term dialect carries, he proposes the term “nation language”
which does justice to the productive difference which non-standard language offers the
author wishing to subvert the language of the colonizer. Nation language has the rare

186
The Irish in particular were famous for warped pronunciation and twisted logic. Maria Edgeworth’s
Essay on Irish Bulls (1802) came at a time when the reputation of the Irish as bull-makers had already been
cemented.

111
ability to instill a new rhythmic note in poetry; it is a peculiar hybrid which has not
forgotten its ties to the African substratum.
187

Braithwaite bases his theory of linguistic (and by implication literary) development in
the Caribbean on the interplay between submergence and re-emergence. For him, the
African substratum is the carrier of a long history, which can still be heard in the rhythms
of the new hybrid language. The African core has the potential to explode the English
language, and it is this linguistic violence which Brathwaite seeks. To call this language
“dialect” is to insult its power, for it is nothing marginal or submerged any more:
Dialect is thought of as ‘bad English’. Dialect is ‘inferior English’. Dialect is the
language used when you want to make fun of someone. Caricature speaks in
dialect. Dialect has a long history coming from plantation where people’s
dignity is distorted through their language and the descriptions which the dialect
gave to them. Nation language, on the other hand, is the submerged area of the
dialect which is more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the
Caribbean. It may be in English: but often it is in an English which is like a howl,
or a shout or a machine-gun or the wind or a wave. It is also like the blues. And
sometimes it is English and African at the same time.
188

Analyzing the use of dialect by modernists, Michael North reaches the same conclusion:
that in modernist poetic practice dialect use becomes a subversive strategy. In the preface
to his study of dialect in the works of modernist writers, North explains that something

187
‘It is nation language in the Caribbean that, in fact, largely ignores the pentameter. Nation language is
the language which is influenced very strongly by the African model, the African aspect of our New
World/Caribbean heritage. English it may be in terms of some of its lexical features. But in its contours, its
rhythm and timbre, its sound explosions, it is no English, even though the words, as you hear them, might
be English to a greater or lesser degree…But it is an English which is not the standard, imported, educated
English, but that of the submerged surrealist experience and sensibility which has always been there and
which is now increasingly coming to the surface and influencing the perception of contemporary Caribbean
people. It is what I call, as I say, nation language. I use the term in contrast to dialect.’ (Kamau Brathwaite,
History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry, 1984;
excerpts from Brathwaite’s lecture are reprinted in Ahmad, pp 459ff.

188
Rotten English, pp 464-7.
112
more radical than a return to primitivist cultural roots is at stake in the strategies of
appropriation of dialectal speech by writers like Stein, Eliot, McKay, and Conrad:
To see these strategies simply as instances of modern primitivism is to miss a
good deal of their importance. That the modern covets the primitive –
perhaps even created it – is another frequently acknowledged fact. But to view
this attraction merely as a return to nature, a recoil from modernity, is to focus
myopically on a rather vapid message while missing its far more intriguing
medium. The real attraction of the black voice to writers like Stein and Eliot was
its technical distinction, its insurrectionary opposition to the known and familiar
in language. For them the artist occupied the role of racial outsider because he or
she spoke a language opposed to the standard. Modernism, that is to say,
mimicked the strategies of dialect and aspired to become a dialect itself… For
the play among rival languages that dialect mimicry made possible led to a
breakdown of both the privilege that the standard enjoyed and the myth that
there could be a "natural" alternative. In his way, dialect became the prototype
for the most radical representational strategies of English-language
modernism.
189

The ‘insurrectionary opposition to the known and familiar in language’ points to the
potential of dialect to subvert the very notion of literary language and of literariness. In
using the African voice, modernists were in effect heralding the coming of a new voice in
literature written in English. The familiar standard was now being pulled apart, as it were
from the inside, by the radical energy of the long neglected and stigmatized dialect. The
English language itself became in this way “defamiliarized” (to borrow a term from
Russian formalism which North’s analysis explicitly invites) and the result is a new
privilege. If, in Lisa Minnick’s formulation, the use of dialect for literary purposes entails
a dichotomy between ‘Liberation’ and ‘Limitation’, North squarely aligns modernists on
the side of the former. No longer trapped by the chains of dialect, the modernist uses the

189
North, Michael, Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, Oxford
University Press, 1998, p. v.

113
subversive potential of dialect for the purposes of literary innovation – at least for a
while.
190

190
‘Limitation’ does have the final say in North’s analysis, at least as far as authors like Eliot are concerned.
They are after all members of a privileged set which can only don the mask of authenticity in an artificial
procedure which does not actually liberate (but manages to circumscribe) the black voice. In the end,
dialect was only a literary strategy spurring the modernist to innovation. For the dichotomy, see Minnick,
Lisa, Dialect and Dichotomy. Literary Representations of African American Speech, The University of
Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa, 2004.
In his chapter on McKay, North imagines McKay’s modernist project as being one of liberation: the
young poet tried to free dialect from the shackles of stereotype but was ultimately unable to do so. The
chains of dialect proved too strong as limitation prevailed in this particular version of the tale of two L’s.
North cannot see a way out: ‘How could any writer break out of a circle of expectations as solidly drawn
as this one? Beginning Songs of Jamaica in the role of Quashie might seem a bold enough move if Jekyll
[McKay’s white guardian who put him up to writing in Caribbean dialect] had not already used all of
Jamaican dialect literature to pose himself as Quashie against the stern, utilitarian England he had fled.
Because Jekyll persists in seeing black Jamaicans as natural, childlike, and full of tomfoolery, against an
overly cultured England, dialect can never confront English directly, culture to culture. The language a
writer like McKay might use against the standard English he was taught in school has already been turned
into a harmless curiosity before he can get to it. This double dispossession provides both the condition and
the subject of the rest of McKay's writing, even after he abandons dialect itself.’ (Dialect of Modernism, p.
110).
In Dialect and Dichotomy, Lisa Minnick places modernist literary uses of black English in the framework
of a logical bifurcation: a figure like James Weldon Johnson, among other African American writers, was
confronted by the fact that ‘the African American artist had been categorized via dialect poetry, confined to
a “niche” as a stereotypical “happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo- picking being more or less a
pathetic figure”.’ Modernists ‘wanted to represent authentic African American experiences’ but at the same
time this impulse to liberation was stymied by the fact that they were limiting themselves and all African
Americans in the eyes of predominantly white literary consumers to stereotyped images.’ (p. 23)
This is also the gist of David Holmes’s argument in Revisiting Racialized Voice. African American Ethos
in Language and Literature (Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, 2004) where he sees the
African author chafing against a similar yoke. ‘By the nineteenth century, many white Americans had
already begun linking literacy with race and ontology, thus forming a paradigm that, for the African
American, could be transcended neither by introspection nor in the projection of articulate public
discourse.’ (pp. 19-20) One after another, Charles Waddell Chestnutt, Du Bois, and later Faulkner and
Hurston, responded, according to Holmes, to this logical bifurcation, choosing their own paths within a
limiting set-up and managing to escape the shackles of the dichotomy with progressive degrees of success.
Du Bois, for one, tried to universalize black voice by representing black folk culture as the soul of the
whole of America. The only successful escapee is Zora Hurston whose resistance to categorization, in
Homles’s argument, ‘was motivated neither by the desire to create an alternative racial identity (as it was
for Chestnutt) nor to find a more fitting descriptor for race (as it was for Du Bois). Rather, Hurston’s quest
is rooted in play of the search itself.’ (Revisiting, p. 76) In other words, as Henry Louis Gates implies (see
The Signifying Monkey, p. 176, cited in Holmes, p. 55) she really inhabits the space of the folk: ‘The
narrative voice Hurston created…is a lyrical and disembodied yet individual voice, from which emerges a
singular longing utterance, a transcendent, ultimately racial self, extending far beyond the merely
individual. Hurston realized a resonant and authentic narrative voice that echoes and aspires to the status of
the impersonality, anonymity, and authority of the black vernacular tradition, a nameless, selfless tradition,
at once collective and compelling, true somehow to the unwritten text of a common blackness.’
114
In my analysis of the creative use of dialect by J. M. Synge, I have attempted to
disassociate the discussion of modernist uses of dialect from the standard dilemma
between liberty and limitation – the two terms that have dominated analyses of the
politics of dialect in literature. I see Irish renaissance writers as precursors to more recent
experiments with hybridity.
191
However, the idea of a tug-of-war with the standard norm
which most scholars who study the dilemma emphasize is valuable since it projects a
dynamic cultural conflict onto the use of language itself. I wish to follow North’s
suggestion about the capacity of dialect to act in opposition to the standard. But placing
the emphasis back on the subversive potential of the hybrid language forged by authors
like J. M. Synge allows me to make an even larger claim. The work of Irish renaissance
authors does not merely consist in twisting English out of its accustomed shape, of
defamiliarizing the familiar; the cultural rebellion staged by the Irish literary renaissance
was meant also as a critique of inherited notions of what constitutes literature. The
subversion of the very concept of literariness (and it was naturally the English imperial
center with its literary fashions which was the main target) was in a way a rewriting of
literary history. As will become evident in the following sections, the dramatic and
translation work of Synge manages to deconstruct inherited models of canonical literary
value. Of course, recent examples of ethnic writing belong to this same space of
expansion (or subversion) of the literary canon. For this reason, modernists like Synge
are especially relevant in today’s academic context. As nien-ming ch’ien comments,

The question of the use of dialect for literary purposes is of course much broader than I have suggesxted
here. It is for this reason that discussions of dialect should not confine themselves to the narrow conception
of a dichotomy.

115
‘With increasing frequency in literature, readers are encountering barely intelligible and
sometimes unrecognizable English created through a blending of one or more languages
with English.’
192
Today, the question of the liberty or limitation that this strategic
blending implies does not arise so much since it is now trendy to be non-standard: ‘Amid
the stuttering we can see a newly confident use of vernaculars, happening simultaneously
with the burgeoning of ethnic pride.’
193
But at the beginning of the twentieth century,
authors like Synge were blazing a new trail as the use of accented English did not have
the same or even remotely similar aesthetic capital. These authors were to show that
dialect in literature did not coincide with parody of an ethnic group. Unlike recent writers
who use a hybridized English in their works, Irish modernists had to write against an
overwhelming high-tide of comical and warped representations of dialect. It would be a
mistake, however, to claim that their works show any sings of discomfort in the face of
such limiting reader expectations, or that, by writing in dialect, these authors attempt to
free themselves from a cultural straight-jacket. On the contrary, with a sense of discovery
and wonder, they steeped themselves in the language of the folk, and the hybrid
Englishes they fashioned in their works are suffused with the feeling of jubilant
experimentation.
Literary Language as Inter-language
The language of Irish renaissance authors like Douglas Hyde, J. M. Synge and Lady
Gregory has been widely praised by commentators on the score that it managed to

192
nien-ming ch’ien, evelyn, Weird English, Harvard University Press, 2004, pp 3-4.

193
Ibid., p.19.
116
introduce a fresh note into the English language. But as a linguistic construct, this
language borrowed its raw material from the language of the folk. In an important sense,
these authors (who abandoned the antiquarian idea of old canonical Gaelic as the only
probable source for the ‘Celtic note’ which they wanted to instill in their writing) went
directly to the folk the way a foreign language learner targets his or her language of study.
They learned Hiberno-English, the kind of English spoken in Ireland, which was heavily
inflected by a Gaelic substratum. Hyde and Synge studied Gaelic (both the modern
spoken variant and the classical written variant codified in literary texts) in addition to
Hiberno-English. Lady Gregory studied Gaelic from old texts. Hyde and Synge studied
and translated old Gaelic texts. Synge heard a lot of spoken Gaelic and Hiberno-English;
in addition, he carefully studied written Hiberno-English in the form of letters penned by
native speakers of both languages. Yeats tried to study Gaelic, accompanied Lady
Gregory on field-trips to the countryside where he heard a lot of Hiberno-English, and
collaborated with her in the use of Hiberno-English for literary purposes. Other Irish
revival authors like MacDonagh and O’Casey could also be included in this foreign-
language classroom, but even the foregoing sketchy account should suffice to prove that
the literary output of Irish renaissance writers can be placed in a context of second
language acquisition (SLA).
What is more, since the Irish people themselves had to fashion their language in a
context of second language acquisition, the Irish authors are in a unique position, doubly
117
framed as their language is by SLA.
194
In a very real sense, Synge and others borrowed
from the folk’s work in translation, hence their literary language occupies the hybrid
space of inter-language. But it is important for us to extend this idea and place the notion
of subversive literariness which has emerged from the discussion so far into a framework
of inter-language. Literary language as inter-language. From this, it follows that what the
Irish renaissance does is to place hybridity at the center of literariness. We no longer have
the literary (written) appropriating the spoken. Rather, the spoken is placed at the very
center of the literary. As will become evident from the discussion of Synge’s translations
of Petrarch and other canonical texts in the European literary tradition, is it almost as if
the spoken appropriates the literary (written). Now, this is a far cry from the
institutionalized literary language which, as Guillory shows, is perpetuated by the school-
sponsored official canon.
195

What does it mean for literary language to be an inter-language? How can the history of
Hiberno-English (HE) be used as a model for thinking Synge’s hybrid English? The story
of HE is a story of a massive process of language acquisition. It has as its center a
convulsed tale of the Gaelic substratum with its many vicissitudes, triumphs, losses and
survivals.
196
For a long time, the Irish people were stranded in an interlinguistic space.
197

194
Irish authors whose native language was English studied Hiberno-English which was itself a product of
the Irish people (native speakers of Gaelic) having acquired English.

195
See his Cultural Capital, The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (The University of Chicago Press:
Chicago, 1994), esp. ‘Part One: Critique’. I will come back to Guillory’s discussion of literary language in
my analysis of Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

196
Loreto Todd neatly summarizes the reasons ‘why the natural transmission of a language from one
generation to the next was disrupted in Ireland (Todd, Loreto, The Language of Irish Literature, Palgrave
Macmillan, 1989, pp 73 ff.). These include the punitive penal laws of the 18th century, the continuing trend
118
The crucial period in Ireland was the 19th century when the demise of Gaelic was all but
complete. In such a cultural context, there was a strong sense of duality, a feeling of
being in exile in the new language. This foreign-own language was, as evelyn nien-ming
ch’ien puts it, a ‘weird English’, while the speakers of this type of language were natural
linguistic anarchists.
198
In her view, the original language seeks re-embodiment in the
new linguistic culture. In Ireland, where bilingualism
199
overlapped for a significant
period of time with the systematic erasure of the native language, this process was
prolonged and painful. Thus authors like Synge can be thought of as reflecting in their
work (as indeed in their own efforts at language acquisition) the linguistic history of the
folk. In ch’ien’s formulation, ‘the subject matter of these writers [i.e. ‘weird-English
writers’] is not simply a narrative but an effort to reembody language: its historical
residue, its syntax, its grammar, its tone, and its sentiment
200
…The shadow quality of a
former culture manifests itself concretely in language.’
201

– since the 17th century – of segregation between planters and native population, the system of National
Schools introduced in 1831 which made English the only medium of education, the ‘Great Hunger’ of
1846-9, and the ‘technique that linguists call “reflexification”. In reflexification, a person learns some
words from a target language but slots them in to the grammatical patterns of their mother tongue.’
‘Reflexification is widespread in communities where one group of people tries to learn the language of
another under conditions of pressure or segregation.’ Reflexified English would itself be the target of the
creative efforts Irish modernist writers.

197
‘What makes the study of Hiberno-English dialects particularly intriguing is their historical background:
they are a product of a unique linguistic situation involving longstanding contact between two languages.’
(Filppula, Markku, The Grammar of Irish English. Language in Hibernian Style, Routledge: London and
New York, 1999, p. 1)

198
Cf. Weird English.

199
Cf. The Grammar of Irish English, p.10.

200
‘Melodies’ and singsong patterns as well as rhythms are especially persistent. Dialects preserve and
heavily draw on this natural melody of speech. More generally, this peculiar sounding of the standard
language can be viewed as a skeptical or creative commentary upon the enforced target language.
119
***
The national language of Ireland then, is a kind of inter-language, the product of
conscious acquisition, a studied, non-native mongrel – a combination of an original
element always lying in wait, always about to precipitate, to effervesce, and a more overt
(‘target’) element to which, for pragmatic purposes, the language-acquiring folk had to
aspire. Intertwined with this official aspiration (as in a school room), internal negotiation
(in the form of translation, hybridization, transposition) between the two languages led to
a unique form of linguistic precipitation: ‘For all these writers, their English is
interpolated by a language of the past… a ghosted language.’
202
This is a ghost which
calls a body to action. The following are some representative examples of inter-linguistic
tendencies in Synge’s work: the feeling of being in exile, the aptitude for linguistic
anarchy, the effort to re-embody language, etc.
In The Shadow of the Glen is an example of Synge’s attempt to capture the lilting
rhythms of peasant speech. At this early stage of his dramatic career, we see a formality
of diction – but it is a formality which makes the musical aspects of the dialog come out
all the more strongly. It is not yet Synge’s masterful verse-prose hybrid speech that jumps

Conversely, such substratal residua could be the folk’s way of insisting, call-and-response fashion, on the
prestige of its own language. As John Harris explains, ‘Previously, it was held that the prestige which
attaches to varieties spoken by economically powerful elites was the overriding social factor that dictated
the direction of linguistic change…At least as significant… are pressures of group loyalty which ensure
that the covert prestige which attaches to local vernacular forms is often powerful enough to override
considerations of overt prestige.’ Thus, ‘local covert norms’ vie for recognition with the enforced, official
linguistic norms. (John Harris, Phonological Variation and Change. Studies in Hiberno-English,
Cambridge University Press: 1985, pp 5-6).

201
Weird English, p. 18.

202
Ibid., p. 17.
120
out of the page; the music of the spoken words is formalized and sometimes slightly stiff.
Yet, the very idea of peasants speaking that way on stage was rather new – and it maybe
for this reason that Synge stressed the formality of the music so much. The speech tunes
are not as varied as they are in Synge’s later plays and that creates a feeling of monotony.
Here is the opening exchange in The Shadow of the Glen which represents a language
having been fully born and yet a language which was to develop in complexity and
variety over the years. The stiffness of the speech is relatively successfully offset by the
lilting intonation patterns. The only problem is lack of variety. A rare prose segment is
Nora’s line which mixes a declarative with an imperative (‘It doesn’t matter anyway,
stranger, come in out of the rain.’) But even that prose segment gets engulfed by the
monotomous current so that its natural caesura after ‘stranger’, and the implied change of
pitch, gets almost entirely ironed out by the “poetry” of the surrounding dialog. The
tempo is relatively slow. The combination of tempo and lilting tone units creates a sense
of discovery of how this language is going to work on stage – this sense of new-ness
seems to fit the situation perfectly. One will do well to note that only the right tempo can
make this opening exchange sound convincing. A slowed-down tempo which adds too
much intonational variation (let alone a trailing rhythm which approximates sing-song) is
bound to destroy the effect of tidy uniformity which Synge’s early stage language is
prone to.
TRAMP Outside.
Good evening to you, Lady of the house.

NORA Good evening, kindly stranger, it’s a wild night, God help you, to be out in the
rain falling.
121

TRAMP It is surely, and I walking to Brittas from the Aughrim fair.

NORA Is it walking on your feet, stranger?

TRAMP On my two feet, lady of the house, and when I saw the light below I thought
maybe if you’d a sup of old milk and a quiet decent corner where a man could sleep (he
looks in past her and sees the dead man). Lord have mercy on us all!

NORA It doesn’t matter anyway, stranger, come in out of the rain.

TRAMP Coming in slowly towards the bed.
Is it departed he is?

NORA It is, stranger, he’s after dying on me, God forgive him, and there I am now with
a hundred sheep beyond the hills, and no turf drawn for the winter.

TRAMP Looking closely at the dead man.
It’s a queer look is on him for a man that’s dead.

NORA Half-humorously.
He was always queer, stranger, and I suppose them that’s queer and they living
men will be queer bodies after.

TRAMP Isn’t it a great wonder you’re letting him lie there, and he is not tidied or laid
out itself.
203

It goes on like that for quite a while. The tension between prose and (free) verse is
palpable. One feels the language trying to precipitate as either one or the other, with free
verse (except when it is interspersed with short prose bits) winning most of the time. As
one stage direction has it, the characters speak ‘with a sort of constraint.’
204
As Seán Ó
Tuama observes, this ‘mono-toned style’ cannot be used for a naturalistic setting but only

203
In the Shadow of the Glen, pp 8-9. (The Works of J. M. Synge. Volume One, John W. Luce and Company:
Boston, 1912)

204
Ibid., p. 17.

122
for situations which are ‘distanced from life’ where there is no need for verisimilitude.
205

It is not true, however, that ‘Synge’s dialect … has little tonal subtlety’ generally
speaking. As the following example from The Tinker’s Wedding shows, Synge was to
introduce a considerable amount of tonal variation in his later experiments with the stage
dialect.
206
We only have to hear the opening exchange in The Tinker’s Wedding to realize
that Synge’s stage dialect could produce a panorama of voices. Even the stages directions,
used much more consistently in this later play, suggest a polytonal universe of sound
where characters can take a variety of roles through the use of language. The language is
considerably more prosaic and flexible, even though some of Synge’s favorite cadences
still show up (e.g. the cadence ta-ta-TA ta-TA where two syllabic groups each end in a
stressed syllable prefaced by two and one unstressed syllables respectively) as in ‘to his
house to-night’; ‘at the dawn of day’; ‘and a sainted joy’ (one recalls the occurrence of
the same cadence in The Playboy ‘of the Western world’). Overall, the effect is one of

205
Cf. ‘Synge and the Idea of a National Literature’ in J. M. Synge. Centenary Papers, p. 12.

206
Even In the Shadow is generally not so monotonous as the excerpted passage suggests, and it may be to
relieve the monotony that Synge peppered his dialog with curt lines in prose whose number and urgency
intensifies as the play goes on. That Synge was quite conscious of this monotony is obvious from the
following exchange in which the dead man living again gruffly swipes away a particularly lilting “poetic”
passage:

‘TRAMP You’ll not be getting your death with myself, lady of the house, and I knowing all the ways a
man can put food in his mouth … We’ll be going now, I’m telling you, and the time you’ll be feeling the
cold, and the frost, and the great rain, and the sun again, and the south wind blowing in the glens, you’ll not
be sitting up on a wet ditch, the way you’re after sitting in the place, making yourself old with looking on
each day, and it passing you by. You’ll be saying one time, “It’s a grand evening, by the grace of God,” and
another time, “It’s a wild night, God help us, but it’ll pass surely.” You’ll be saying –

DAN Goes over to them crying out impatiently.
Go out that door I’m telling you, and do you blathering below in the glen.’ (Ibid., pp 37-8)

Ironically, even Dan’s diatribe gets lost in this cadential blathering.

123
vertiginous tone-shifting; so strong is this tendency that some commentators have seen it
as a failure.
207

SARAH CASEY – coming in on right, eagerly. – We’ll see his reverence this place,
Michael Byrne, and he passing backward to his house to-night.

MICHAEL – grimly. – That’ll be a sacred and a sainted joy!

SARAH – sharply. – It’ll be small joy for yourself if you aren’t ready with my wedding
ring. (She goes over to him.) Is it near done this time, or what way is it at all?
MICAHEL. A poor way only, Sarah Casey, for it’s the divil’s job making a ring, and
you’ll be having my hands destroyed in a short while the way I’ll not be able to make a
tin can at all maybe at the dawn of day.

SARAH – sitting down beside him and throwing sticks on the fire. – If it’s the divil’s job,
let you mind it and leave your speeches that would choke a fool.

MICHAEL – slowly and glumly. – And it’s you’ll go talking of fools, Sarah Casey, when
no man did ever hear a lying story even of your like unto this mortal day. You to be going
beside me a great while, and rearing a lot of them, and then to be setting off with your
talk of getting married, and your driving me to it, and I not asking it at all.
208

In Riders to the Sea (Synge’s next play), Maurya is the poetry-talker. She is constantly
accused by her daughter Cathleen for her incessant babbling about an impending doom.
The parallel presentation of several versions of reality (i.e. Michael going out to sea and
his version of it, Cathleen’s pragmatic attitude to the necessity of Michael’s going, and
Maurya’s ominous talk informed by her “second sight”) allows Synge to mix different
registers of the prose-poetry hybrid. In the following exchange, the dialog quickly moves

207
Daniel Corkery, one of Synge’s earliest and most categorically prejudiced commentators, dismisses The
Wedding as an instance of the dramatist’s ‘lack of proportion’ (Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature. A Study,
Russell & Russell: New York, 1965, first published 1931, p. 149).

208
The Tinker’s Wedding, pp 13-4, in The Works of J. M. Synge, op. cit.

124
through several of these registers. The dialog occupies the space of inter-language more
emphatically than it did in the previous play.
BARTLEY Getting his purse and tobacco.
I’ll have half an hour to go down, and you’ll see me coming again in two
days, or in three days, or maybe in four days if the wind is bad.

MAURYA Turning round to the fire, and putting her shawl over her head.
Isn’t it a hard and cruel man won’t hear a word from an old woman, and she
holding him from the sea?

CATHLEEN It’s the life of a young man to be going on the sea, and who would listen
to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over.

BARTLEY Taking the halter.
I must go now quickly. I’ll ride down on the grey mare, and the red pony’ll
ride behind me …The blessing of God on you.
He goes out.

MAURYA Crying out as he is in the door.
He’s gone now, God spare us and we’ll not see him again. He’s gone now
and when the black night is falling I’ll have no son left me in the world.

CATHLEEN Why wouldn’t you give him your blessing and he looking round in the
door? Isn’t it sorrow enough is on everyone in this house without your sending him out
with an unlucky word behind him, and a hard word in his ear?
209

It is quite appropriate to talk of a choric principle at work in Synge’s plays where a mix
of different voices often sounds together or in close proximity to one another. Thus,
towards the end of Riders, Maurya launches a monotonous lamentation in free verse over
all the sons she lost to the sea. Some of it is strikingly powerful as a muted but
profoundly tragic speech. One hears in it the wail of the keener with a lot of movement in
the cadences, which, in the context of the play, is also an imitation of the waves of the sea.
This mournful song recedes into the background when it is interrupted at odd moments

209
Riders to the Sea, pp 25-6, in The Works of J. M. Synge, op. cit.
125
with short exchanges (always tending much more to prose than to verse) between the
other characters present. The result is a sense of Maurya’s unfixed voice coming in and
out of reality, as it were, and sometimes sounding like an acoustic background to the
more firmly situated voices of her daughters and guests. The passage displays Synge’s
ability to control the hybrid not only in terms of individual cadences and tone units but
also as a larger choric mechanism where voices overlap.
Throughout her stirring keen, one can almost hear the noises of the wind and the sea.
The whole passage is spoken against the background of keening women – the result is
several layers of sound.
MAURYA Raising her head and speaking as if she did not hear the people around her.
They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me ….
I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south,
and you can hear the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they
hitting one on the other. I’ll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water
in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won’t care what way the sea is when the other
women will be keening. (To Nora) Give me the Holy Water, Nora, there’s a small sup
still on the dresser.
Nora gives it to her.

MAURYA Drops Michael’s clothes across Bartley’s feet, and sprinkles the Holy Water
over him.
It isn’t that I haven’t prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty God. It isn’t
that I haven’t said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn’t know what I’ld be saying;
but it’s a great rest I’ll have now, and it’s time surely. It’s a great rest I’ll have now, and
great sleeping in the long nights after Samhain, if it’s only on a bit of wet floor we do
have to eat, and maybe a fish that would be stinking.
She kneels down again, crossing herself, and saying prayers under her
breath.

CATHLEEN To an old man. Maybe yourself and Eamon would make a coffin when
the sun rises...

THE OLD MAN Looking at the boards. Are there nails with them?
[…]
126
MAURYA Puts the empty cup mouth downwards on the table, and lays her hands
together on Bartley’s feet.
They’re all together this time, and the end is come. May the Almighty God
have mercy on Bartley’s soul, and on Michael’s soul, and on the souls Sheamus and
Patch, and Stephen and Shawn (bending her head); and may He have mercy on my soul,
Nora, and the soul of everyone is left living in the world.
She pauses, and the keen rises a little more loudly from the women, then
sinks away.

MAURYA Continuing.
Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God.
Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What
more can we want than that? No man at all can be living forever, and we must be
satisfied.
210

These are the last words of the play, and they show Synge at his best. In one voice, he
has distilled the traditional keen, the sounds of nature, and the individual voice of Maurya.
There is a strong sense of the attempt to re-embody language as if the keen is an abstract
sound desiring to precipitate in Maurya’s words. The much greater tonal variety (than
was the case in The Shadow) as well as the truly hybrid nature of the prose-poetry mix is
a fit vehicle for the expression of this multi-layered acoustic world. The play as a whole
creates the sense of urgent doom, but there is also a measure of undecidability and lack of
resolution, which is better suited by the hybridity of Synge’s language – a more
emphatically metric speech would undercut the sense of disorientation, while a less
rhythmic speech would not have captured the sounds of the sea or the voice of the
keening tradition. The keen is, after all, a rudimentary type of song, hence Maurya’s
capacity to make musical speech. This is not merely a fresh note in dramatic language.
We see an entirely new conception of literary language at work here. The driving

210
Ibid., pp 44-5.
127
mechanism is the motivation of sound, the re-embodiment of the spoken, the sense of
language inhabiting a hybrid space between prose and poetry, reality and unreality,
fixedness and evanescence. The ephemeral nature of the stage dialect which is always
waiting to precipitate into the language of this or that character escapes the fixity of the
written word. But it is precisely in this respect that the language is vulnerable. Like the
peasant speech which Synge and other folklorists hastened to record, this dialect is
always on the verge of disappearing. Maurya is an exile in language not simply because
she alone occupies the poetic register (and gets reprimanded for that); beyond that, what
is important to see is that her language is always unsatisfied (in spite of her last words) –
that is why she must say it again and again.
***
Broadly speaking, two camps have battled it out concerning Synge’s use of dialect. The
first (usually older) camp register a complaint that Synge’s language is not truly
representative of the way Irish peasants really spoke during his time. The second camp
(whose most erudite representatives are probably Alan Bliss and Declan Kiberd) has
offered two responses to the complaint: one claims that Synge’s language is indeed true-
to-life, the other that the whole discussion of Synge’s dialect in terms of its being a close
approximation of actual speech is a side issue since he was only using peasant speech as a
kind of raw material which he then molded into a distinct imaginative literary language.
128
The second response usually incorporates the idea of linguistic veracity emphasized in
the first response.
211

Within the second camp, numerous commentators have pointed to the literary effects of
Synge’s stage dialect, to their subversive potential as well as their capacity to sound a
fresh note in literary language. Daniel Casey mentions ‘a marvelous cadence and style
that emanated from those Aran experiences’.
212
Zack Bowen calls attention to ‘a lilting
almost metrical speech’ through the use of syntactical structures borrowed from the
Gaelic substratum.
213
Robin Skelton talks about ‘speech tunes’ that are all varied but all
rely heavily upon balancing the number of stressed syllables in clauses and phrases.
214

For Nicholas Grene, Synge ‘was quite prepared to alter the form and direction of dialect
usage for the sake of the artistic effects he wanted.’
215
Jim Kilroy calls Synge’s language
‘almost a dialect’
216
(meaning, in the end, a literary product) while Seamus Deane
stresses the ‘joy’ of language
217
in Synge which represents a revision of the ‘pallid
words’ – as Synge called them – of naturalism. Jane Elkins emphasizes the linguistic

211
Kiberd has amply documented Synge’s ability in the Gaelic language. See his magisterial study Synge
and the Irish Language, second edition, Gill and Macmillan: Dublin, 1993.

212
‘John Millington Synge: A Life Apart’ in A J. M. Synge Literary Companion, ed. Edward Kopper,
Greenwood Press: New York, 1988, p 8.

213
‘Synge: The Playboy of the Western World’, in A J. M. Synge Literary Companion, p 78.

214
The Writings of J. M. Synge, The Bobbs-Merrill Company: Indianapolis, Indiana, 1971, p. 135.

215
Synge. A Critical Study of his Plays, Rowman and Littlefield: Totowa, New Jersey, 1975, p. 62.

216
‘The Playboy as Poet’ in Critical Essays on John Millington Synge, ed. Daniel Casey, G. K. Hall & Co:
New York, 1994, p. 119.

217
‘Synge’s Poetic Use of Language’ in Critical Essays on John Millington Synge, p. 28.

129
independence of Synge’s women and calls Mary Byrne ‘a folk artist’
218
; Anthony Roche,
like Elkins, draws a bit closer to folk performance (though, like her, he stays within a
framework of literariness) and points to the ‘the story-telling abilities’ of the characters in
The Well of Saints and their ‘power of weaving verbal spells’.
219
Bonnie Scott
220
– for
whom Synge’s ‘female heroes, particularly the older ones, have stature as fashioners of
tales’ – is among the few commentators who seem to stress folk performance per se.
The language of Synge’s plays is without a doubt extraordinarily worked out. However,
what remains obscured in scholarly talk of selection, distillation, transmutation,
development, etc., is that literariness (i.e. the supposed final product of Synge’s efforts) is
not the ultimate target to which Synge’s language strives to attain. Even the anarchy in
his hybrid language, the subversive effects of his plays, the freshness of his translations,
all these things tend to be mistakenly co-opted into a framework of literariness and seen
as being directed in one way or the other towards this target. It seems to me, however,
that the potential of Synge’s language to subvert the very idea of literariness lies in a
strategy which he consciously borrowed from the folk. Just as dialect never intends to
aim at the prestige standard but runs parallel to it, following its own current, leading its
own existence, just as folklore channels its modes along paths independent of the paths of

218
‘”Cute Thinking Women”: The Language of Synge’s Female Vagrants’ in Assessing the Achievement of
J. M. Synge, p. 119.

219
‘The Two Worlds of Synge’s The Well of Saints’, in Critical Essays on John Millington Synge, ed.
Daniel Casey, p 106.

220
‘Synge’s Language of Women’ in A Companion to Synge Studies, ed. E. A. Kopper, p. 182.

130
literature
221
, so Synge’s plays and “literary” translations subvert literary language (and
the very notion of literariness) by acting as a spoken alternative to it. In this context, the
fresh note which Synge sounds is not intended to become part of a larger symphony –
rather, it is a mode whose laws of composition constantly assert their difference. In more
ways that one, Synge’s approach is literal. He let his characters go on their own limb and
he listened. This may explain the modal nature of his dramatic language and indeed of the
language of his literary translations. What is at stake in this strategy of creative listening
is the capacity to turn away from literariness, to allow the oral space of the folk to
resound to the full and in its own voice. The philological spirit of Max Müller, for whom
primitive cultures represented an escape from codified literariness, is manifested in
Synge’s stage language.
222

Synge used actual speech as a kind of mode, a distinct folk-note, within which he
improvised precisely because he could follow it in the details. As one of the earliest
commentators on Synge so felicitously put it, Synge’s language possesses a ‘coefficient
of Hibernicism’.
223
The more anarchical the relation between non-standard and standard
language, the more intensified Synge’s dialect becomes. (Funnily, the only thing that

221
This is not to deny that folklore can feel free to borrow from the literary tradition. Seán Ó Tuama is one
of many commentators who have stressed the fact that what is called ‘peasant culture’ has a somewhat
different meaning in the Irish context. Peasants in Ireland were also inheritors of a high culture, ‘an
aristocratic tradition which lasted strongly in Ireland for practically two thousand years, down into the
seventeenth century.’ (‘Synge and the Idea of a National Literature’, in J. M. Synge. Centenary Papers, ed.
Maurice Harmon, p. 4)

222
See the section ‘Dialects of Paradise’ below for a fuller discussion of Müller and his relevance to
Synge’s work with dialect.

223
Cited by Bliss (Alan J. Bliss, 'The Language of Synge', in JM Synge: Centenary Papers 1971, ed.
Maurice Harmon, p. 51).

131
beats it is Joyce’s generic parody of this style, which would probably score the highest in
terms of the Hibernicism coefficient.
224
) As to anarchical tendencies in language, there is
no lack of those in The Tinker’s Wedding. Here the dialect mode really comes into its
own. In many ways, the rampant language of the tinkers is an attempt to return some of
the linguistic agency which the Irish had lost during the nineteenth century.
***
Stripped of any agency, the Irish folks reduplicated their efforts to gain agency.
‘Resurgences of agency manifest themselves in the composition of new language and
dialects.’
225
The developing language is the result of a powerful drive to acquisition as
well as of quiet re-membering. The speaker of such a hybrid language develops a feeling
for language in general. Once, the language scene is realized in terms of compartments
and alternatives (e.g. English for such and such purpose, Irish for home use, etc.), it is on
the way to being charted and re-drawn according to personal preference. The affect which
develops in relation to the pragmatic use of various registers of a language is a way of
forging one’s own language – a way of blazing new trails which it will later be the task of
etymologist to retrace. The carryover of material properly belonging to one compartment
of language into another is a smuggling of sorts of over- and undertones: these semitones
become particularly expressive of ethos. As nien-ming ch’ien astutely explains, a culture

224
‘Twas murmur we did it for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I’m thinking, and he limp and leching’.
The quote is from Ulysses where a number of these parodies appear. Here is another example of a nut all
too flavored: ‘And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your conglomerations
the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the drouthy clerics de be fainting for a pussful.’ (Cited
in A Dictionary and Glossary for the Irish Revival, 1995, pp 73, 95)

225
Weird English, p. 36.

132
can be expressed in subtle features such as cadences, rhythms, tonality, degrees of
voicedness, etc.
226
This is especially true of the restless exile in language who chafes
against the yoke of demarcation. Speaking becomes a highly imaginative position-taking
while acquisition is the twin of willful misacquisition. Toeing the line is parallel to
staking off one’s own clearing within language. The space of language is an experimental
ground where exercises in hybridity and assimilation constitute the staple of the linguistic
life of the people.
The Tinker’s Wedding is a masterpiece in linguistic position-taking. There are only four
characters, but there are many more voices. The linguistic agency the tinkers gain vis-à-
vis the priest and each other is evident in their strategic use of voice. Each character
stakes off his or her own linguistic clearing so that a considerable part of the fun comes
from the collision and riotous cohabitation of these separate spheres. The tempo is faster
than anything we’ve seen so far but the rhythmicality of the prose (or, more appropriately,
of the prose-free-verse mix) is pronounced. The speech moves in fits and starts, and
stresses are a lot more emphatic (as if the language itself imitates the tinker’s occupation).
An effect of rough (but not harsh) vocality is produced through the use of curt speech
tones which are, however, often mixed with longer cadences of a more mellow tone. We
are not simply given a hefty dose of unmitigated slapdash humor – the dialog is carefully
worked out, and even though it is spicier and harder to follow, it retains a substantial
measure of the lyricism typical of all of Synge’s plays. What distinguishes this play from

226
‘The subtleties of culture manifest themselves in the host of details that are involved in learning a
language: the pitch, intonations, accents, and use that must be dismantled and reorganized to master new
linguistic techniques.’ (Weird English, p. 27)
133
the rest is that the mellow music does not stand out so much since it is assimilated into
what is probably the closest approximation of Synge’s ideal of rustic speech. But it is a
carefully circumscribed rudeness, as the following tuneful exchange shows with its
alliterations and dancy rhythms (as in ‘spring time is a queer time’; ‘since the moon did
change’; ‘with walking up and walking down’):
MICHAEL – angrily. – Can’t you speak a word when I’m asking what is it ails you since
the moon did change?

SARAH – musingly – I’m thinking there isn’t anything ails me, Michael Byrne; but the
spring time is a queer time, and it’s queer thoughts maybe I do think at whiles.

MICHAEL. It’s hard set you’d be to think queerer than welcome, Sarah Casey; but what
will you gain dragging me to the priest this night I’m saying, when it’s new thoughts
you’ll be thinking at the dawn of day?

SARAH – teasingly. – It’s at the dawn of day I do be thinking I’d have a right to be going
off to the rich tinker’s do be traveling from Tibradden to the Tara Hill; for it’d be a fine
life to be driving with Jaunting Jim, where there wouldn’t be any big hills to break the
back of you, with walking up and walking down.
MICHAEL – with dismay. – It’s the like of that you do be thinking!

SARAH. The like of that, Michael Byrne, when there is a bit of a sun in it, and a kind air,
and a great smell coming from the thorn trees is above your head.
227

It is in this play that the English language is most forcibly (and at the same time freely)
shaped to serve the tone of the speakers. Unlike the two earlier plays we examined, the
stage directions here are interwoven into the texture of the dialog.
The figure of the priest is the referential center of the play in the sense that the tinkers’
words and actions are played off against his persona which stands for centralized,
hierarchical social life. The tinkers assume for a while a variety of unaccustomed
positions vis-à-vis this representative of hierarchical society – but the irony of the whole

227
Op. cit., pp 14-5.
134
situation is that they know all along that they will not mend their ways just for a priest.
However, the institution of marriage proves to be a strange magnet. The priest himself
wonders why someone who lived roadside all her life should want an official marriage.
For all the irony of the play, the tinkers’ brush with the law proves a magnetic field. In
the end they go back to their old dispensation, and we sense that they have not changed at
all, yet we do sense a readiness, indeed an eagerness, to embrace, or at least to wish to
accommodate to, certain aspects of modernity. They live without an obvious tradition
whereby married life is to be institutionalized, and that is why Sarah Casey goes to the
law. They are completely marginalized – like the blind beggars in The Well of Saints –
yet they possess perhaps the biggest range of social awareness of all of Synge’s
characters.
The vagrant tinkers understand, and laugh at, the perspective of the priest as well as of
‘the rural people’ from whom they are ultimately estranged. In their vagrancy, they cover
a wide territory, and it is only the setting of the The Playboy which can compare in terms
of geographical sweep. In many ways, the world of the itinerant tinkers is even wider
than that of Christy Mahon. That they can step in and out of officialdom is evident from
the mute irony of their language, as for instance Mary Byrne’s ‘It’s destroyed you must
be hearing the sins of the rural people on a fine spring’ spoken, as the direction has it,
‘with compassion.’
228
A similar instance of such quasi-urbane position-taking with an
undertone of irony was when Mary Byrne, in her tipsiness, politely refrains from singing
a ‘bad, wicked song’ in the presence of the priest ‘for it’s bad enough he is, I’m thinking,

228
Ibid., p. 25.

135
without ourselves making him worse.’
229
Mary Byrne manages to scandalize the priest
with her provocative talk, and we see her throughout acting as an accomplished speaker.
In the end, she stands out with her capacity to mis-acquire the talk of officialdom and
then expose its failures as it were naively. She mixes registers and traditions, and the
result is a hybrid tradition of her own which mixes the immediate with the legendary:
MARY – sleepily. – I’ve a grand story of the great queens of Ireland with white necks on
them the like of Sarah Casey, and fine arms would hit you a slap the way Sarah Casey
would hit you.
230

Mary possesses a remarkable capacity to parody and mix discourses. In this function, as
well as in her sagacious skepticism of the ways of officialdom, Mary Byrne seems to
represent a folk capable of leading an existence which is parallel to and not necessarily at
odds with modernity. In the end, as Heather Laird has shown, the folk is capable of subtle
position-taking vis-à-vis modern officialdom. Here, it seems appropriate to invoke David
Lloyd’s notion of the non-modernity of traditions which function independently of the
state.
231
His analysis shows that to stigmatize these practices because of their supposed
backwardness is to misunderstand their nature. Beyond the trivial observation that tinkers
who produce a good enter the cash nexus and are therefore part of the process of
modernization, The Tinker’s Wedding is a representation of the folk as astute position-
takers whose outsider status enables them to make a linguistic and even philosophic

229
Ibid., pp 23-4.

230
Ibid., p. 29.

231
For a discussion of Heather Laird and David Lloyd, see the section ‘Who are the Folk?’ in the
introduction.

136
contribution to the wider culture. Except the priest never hears ‘the like of you’.
Ultimately, their code proves too subtle for him; this is because the anarchy of their
language is not flagrantly subversive even as they declaim each other, to win the priest’s
sympathy, as ‘flagrant heathen[s]’.
***
The analysis so far has stressed the subversive nature of the folk’s behavior vis-à-vis
the standard language of the colonizer. However, this process of denormalizing the
enforced language should not be overemphasized. For one thing, the prestige standard
was just that – prestigious. What is more, the learning of this new language could be a
passionate pursuit where aesthetics and pragmatics becomes inextricably linked.
232
This
was after all the language of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One need not posit a speaking
folk thirsty for linguistic vengeance.
233
Instead of insisting exclusively on the anti-norm

232
English was a mass target for folks eager to get ahead. ‘Whilst they may love the cadences, and
mellowness, and homeliness of the language which their fathers gave them, they yet see that obscurity and
poverty distinguish their lot from the English-speaking people; and accordingly no matter what the sacrifice
to their feelings, they long for the acquisition of the ‘new tongue’, with all its prizes and social privileges.
The keystone of fortune is the power of speaking English and to possess this power there is a burning
longing in their breasts which never varies, never moderates.’ (Keenan, 1857-8: xx, cited in Crowley, Tony,
War of Words. The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537-2004, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 124).

233
In some ways, the overemphasis on the reactionary aspect of the weirding of English in (post-)colonial
contexts is logical. The recognition of the colonizing functions of the English language, of its etymological
hostility to the very being of the colonized, and of the dark history of its usage as a weapon for subjugation,
leads to the usual story of subversion within literary works. This is also to be expected, for it is much easier
to imagine the folk taking just a stick than a combination of stick and carrot. It would be too much to
imagine a folk consciously and even passionately in pursuit of a common target-English. Conversely, it is
more logical to suppose that the prettiness of Shakespeare stands for a sort of opium for the masses (handed
out within colonial-style education centers); it then becomes logical for commentators to predicate Irish or
Caribbean or other post-colonial authors in rebellion against the established English literary canon. It seems
to me that the folk-strikes-back motif (whoever the folk might be from African to Chicano/a to queer) is
overused in literary analyses eager to find instances of resistance and subversion in literary works. Another
way of putting it is to suggest that, especially more recently, the literary works themselves have capitalized
on the cultural prestige that subversion carries.

137
element in non-standard language, we could view both the folk’s and the poet’s linguistic
hybridizations as an attempt to naturalize the abnormal. Disorderly English, in the hands
of the masterful folk, sounds natural.
234
The ways in which the folk experiences grammar
(even in an enforced setting) are revolutionary yet subtle. The processes whereby
grammar is destabilized do not come across as capricious bending of establish structure.
Thus, resistance or innovation is not tantamount to explosion. The folk does more than
simply destroy language or push the envelop of grammar; its message is not Look, we can
mean without relying on fixed rules or Our unruly meaning lies outside of your
grammar….Rather than being a denaturalization of the norm, folk grammar is a
naturalization of a parallel ungrammatical universe.
235

Thus, in the radical folk grammatical structures, the weird is not perceived as weird but
as natural; the correct standard (the natural) is then perceived as incomplete and
accidental. In Synge, the normal is not merely facilely denormalized. Rather, the norm is
unsettled in much more effective and aesthetically rich ways by claiming an unlikely
necessity for the abnormal. The language of the folk gives the impression that they have
access to the apocrypha which only narrowly missed inclusion in the grammatical
canon.
236
By canonizing alternative structures, writers like Synge convincingly erect a

234
This is part of the joke in parodic representations of dialect.

235
e.g. Botev’s non-existent tenses based on folk tense-play or Synge and Lady Gregory’s Anglo-Irish
structures. In the case of Botev’s famous strophe (Nastane vecher/mesec izgree etc.; see my analysis of this
strophe in the introduction), we ask ourselves: How come we didn’t have a contemplative/still-time tense in
our prolific verbal system to suggest the pregnant hanging of the becoming night?

236
Strangely enough, their work was new. Dialect poetry was popular in Victorian literature but it never
included Irish in its perimeter. On the other hand, what reference there was to Hiberno-English was part of
the larger presentation of the stage Irishman with his brogue. Cultural nationalists like Ferguson focused on
138
parallel grammar (a new literariness) that should have been part of the language (canon).
To think that such structures should thrive among poor peasants and they to be making
their own grammatical hay and all this verbal material to be there for the taking…
In this context, the creative linguistic work of Irish renaissance authors begins to look
like a type of Englishing/owning of the vernacular folk speech materials. The artistic
intervention of the Playboy of the Western World, for instance, can be seen as a reversal
of roles, with Hiberno-English as a target and English as a substratum. Amy Tan (in her
essay ‘Mother Tongue’, 1990) points precisely to this version of imaginative language
acquisition. In her story of Englishes, she explains:
I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I
spoke to my mother…; the English she used with me…; my translation of her
Chinese…; and what I imagined to be her ttranslation of her Chinese if she
could speak in perfect English, her internal language, and for that I sought to
preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure.
237

Perhaps Synge’s peasants are so extraordinarily poetic, and Lady Gregory’s
‘Kiltartanese’ is so convincing, because their idealized folk were really ‘perfect’ speakers
of English translating from their own Irish substratum into the new/old(?) language. The

old Irish poetry and not on the living speech of the people, while even the Irish Royal Academy remained
unconcerned about the everyday language of the folk. As Crowley mentions, ‘With regard to language
work, it is important to note that [The Royal Irish Academy established in 1785] led the way in not seeking
to study Gaelic as a living language, despite the fact that around half of the population spoke the tongue,
but as the medium of the nation’s historical records.’ (War of Words, p. 99) Predictably, antiquarianism and
cultural nationalism went hand in hand; surprisingly, they by-passed the living speech of the folk. In the
1880s, Modern Irish experienced a change of fortunes via the efforts of the Gaelic League. ‘The rejection
of antiquarianism and the positive attitude towards the modern Irish language which the Gaelic Journal
espoused marked a turning point the language movement’s history.’ (Ibid., p. 136) Douglas Hyde (who was
a contributor to the first issue of the journal) together with Lady Gregory, Synge, and others, extended this
interest to Hiberno-English. Hyde could be seen as a doubly orinigary figure in that he had a foothold in
both the Gaelic and Hiberno-Engish camps.

237
Rotten English, p. 510, emphasis mine.

139
degree and range of hybridization differs from author to author and even within the same
work. In some instances, it is difficult to tell which exactly is the source and which the
target language in such exercises in translation.
238
The main speaker/teller in Synge’s
Playboy provides ample proof of this point.
As Christy gains confidence in his story-telling (‘gradually raising his voice’ as one
stage direction has it), his language begins more and more to seem like the translation of
a perfect English speaker from the Gaelic substratum. Only the experienced blind story-
tellers in The Well of Saints can talk like this:
CHRISTY. It's little I'm understanding myself, saving only that my heart's scalded this
day, and I going off stretching out the earth between us, the way I'll not be waking near
you another dawn of the year till the two of us do arise to hope or judgment with the
saints of God, and now I'd best be going with my wattle in my hand, for hanging is a poor
thing (turning to go), and it's little welcome only is left me in this house to-day.
239

Whether he is ‘nearly speechless with rage’, jubilant in his celebration of his triumphs, or
dreamily anticipating his future, Christy Mahon always chooses the right kind of
language. Interestingly the language of The Playboy is a significant intensification of
both the hibenicism coefficient and the poetic coefficient (if one may call it so). It is as if
the two things go together. The essence of Christy’s internal language (to borrow Amy
Tan’s phrase) constitutes a hybrid between the poetic and the demotic. It is impossible to
separate one from the other, and this is Synge’s final triumph in his project of
constructing a variant literariness.

238
I return to the related point of the mixed directionality of the source-target connection in the section on
second language acquisition.

239
The Playboy of the Western World, p. 58, in op. cit., vol. 2.
140
So natural is Chirsty’s poeticism that we stop perceiving his language as “poetic”.
Much like folklore naturalizes the ungrammatical, so Synge’s stage language is a
naturalized hybrid. Even a hurried exchange can prompt a highly imaginative response
propped by the cadences of the phrasing:
CHRISTY – impatiently –. It's her like is fitted to be handling merchandise in the
heavens above, and what'll I be doing now, I ask you, and I a kind of wonder was jilted
by the heavens when a day was by.
240

In the final analysis, as readers we get the sense of a new literariness in the making, with
degrees of defamiliarization operating in the corpus of Synge’s plays taken as a whole.
Just when the new has become naturalized, a new (more intensified) level of the hybrid
kicks into gear, and the result is a powerful drive forward to the target language. The fact
that the target language is a deviant English, moreover a kind of English which only a
“perfect” speaker of the language could invent, makes Synge’s linguistic project much
more radical than would be the case if he had retreated into the safe haven of
incomprehensibility. It is precisely when English is the target that standard English is the
most subverted.
***
It would be difficult to represent this deviant English in a formula precisely because of
the high degree of its hybridity. Before trying to write in a quasi-mathematical language,
I want to add the idea that Synge’s knowledge of dialect was not confined to the natural
modes of transmission of speech. Like other Irish renaissance authors, Synge learned
Gaelic directly but also bookishly. Synge’s literary language was based both on his

240
Ibid., p. 72.
141
recording of actual speech and on the silent perusal of Gaelic texts. Thus, we find in
Synge (as well as in, say, Lady Gregory) a studious representation of the dialectal hybrid
(a product of the contact between English and Gaelic) mixed with his own Gaelic in
addition to his own native English. If “A” is English and “B” is Gaelic, then their target,
the Hiberno-English dialect, will be “AB”. If the target language is always on the right
side of the equation, and the brackets represent SLA efforts, then the final product of
Synge’s (or for that matter Lady Gregory’s) contact-languaging can be written thus:
A (B) → AB (BA)
A (having done B) aims at AB (which is itself a product of B having done A).
This does not capture the whole story. The folk’s acquisition of English, like that of an
immigrant parent was mostly carried out via the grapevine
241
where significant distortion

241
Grapevine/Razvalen Telefon (Broken Phone): In the mountains, in my grandparents’ village, which was
the last desolate outpost of civilization before you hit the southern border but whose population tripled
during school vacations, we occasionally played Razvalen Telefon. We sat roadside by a dusty no-lane strip
of beaten stone-and-asphalt, tangent to the village central square (megdanat). Megdanat, a circular clearing,
the central hub of social activity, was dominated by its solitary two-storey council house (savetat) on one
side and by a grass-enveloped bus-stop of rusted iron – a favorite shade-haven for village donkeys and fleas
and our former spot – on the other. To complete a magic triangle of play-spots, we sat, in tight formation,
on top of a fallen electrical pole on the fringe of the village central square – a long line of sitters, as many
as the pole would take, facing the coals of the previous night’s bonfire. The Beginning (the kid who
authored the signal) would whisper a word or a short phrase into his or her neighbor’s ear, the neighbor to
his or her neighbor, and so on down the grapevine. The Ending would repeat the signal which had to match
at both ends of the fallen cylindrical pole. Sometimes, the signals matched about as closely as did our
freshman translations in Latin class at Sofia University where an initial Via Appia passes over the
mountains, winds its way down valleys until it reaches the stately city of Rome became The sheriff shot the
rabbit after meticulous reference to the Latin standard dictionary and all kinds of declension tables. The
rest of the game, the fun part, consisted in retracing the signal to see where exactly it must have gotten lost.
The kid who first misheard was the loser of the game and had to go back to being Ending. If the signals
matched, the Beginning was the loser. With patience, any one could accede to the position of the author of
the grapevine signal. Verification of the exact spot of signal rupture was not easy – usually the error spread
over several adjacent grapevine positions. Argument and squabbling were often part of the verification
procedure. It was obvious that transmission of information was not a straightforward thing. Hearsay SLA
can sometimes look like a grapevine mechanism where words are overheard, partially misheard,
connotations hit or missed – this is especially true of the immigrant expecting to pick up the language
quickly on the go.
142
of the signal along the various stages of transmission is evident. Since their own teachers
were like them ESL students, the Irish themselves acquired an English language which
was really an inter-language: i.e. their target was not exactly English except as an ideal.
An improved version of the formula should read thus:
A (B) → AB (B→AB)
Synge (or Lady Gregory) having done Gaelic, targets, in his (her) creative work, the
Hiberno-English of the Irish folk who appropriated the inter-language of their native
Irish-speaking teachers who, in turn, were students of English. This formula begins to
take into account the fact that degrees of removal from the target English must have
existed in those historically traumatic times of mass language learning. But it does not
fully capture the poet’s creative fashioning of the target language. This last function is
especially obvious in Synge’s hauntingly poetic version of Hiberno-English. In her
invented ‘Kiltartanese’, Lady Gregory seems closer to the formula. For Synge the
formula can read thus:
A (B) → AB (B→AB→A)
Synge (having done Gaelic) targets Hiberno-English, which is itself the product of Gaelic
speakers learning the inter-language of their native Irish-speaking teachers but translating
that into the English that they would translate into if they were perfect speakers of
English. This perfect speaker is of course Synge himself whose native language was
English. In the words of Michael Cronin:
Synge as the unhoused, the extraterritorial, wandering between two languages is
a figure who is both translator and translated. He translates but, like so many
143
Anglo-Irish writers of the nineteenth century, he is translating himself into the
language and culture of the other.
242

But since the English which is the product of Synge’s subversive efforts in creating a
variant literary language is hardly the general literariness which Guillory thinks was
Wordsworth’s target
243
, we should mark it with a hybrid, accented symbol since it
represents a kind of accented, hybrid English (let us mark it no longer as A but as Ǣ ):
A (B) → AB (B→AB→ Ǣ )
Translational Aesthetics
It is significant, in the above formula, that the last arrow points to a diminished ‘A’ –
diminished, but still an A. While Synge’s plays may leave their readers (if not their
original audiences) with a shadow of a doubt as to their attempt to swipe away accepted
(fashionable) standards of literariness, his literary translations reverse the arrow so that
Hiberno-English (AB) is now the target while canonical European texts are the source.
What are the strategies available to a modernist who wishes to subvert the standard of
literariness of the prestige variety of English? In this section, I will have a brief recourse
to the issue as it is theoretically resolved by Irish historiography before I go on to
consider Synge’s translation work. Since the target language of Synge’s translations is
itself a translation and since this is the language he used in his plays, one can easily see
how this translational aesthetic extends to the discussion of his dramatic output. I will

242
Op. cit., p. 140.

243
See discussion on Wordsworth below. John Guillory thinks that when Wordsworth claimed in the
Preface to the lyrical ballads that the right kind of literary language was a product of real-life speech with
some impurities removed from it, he in a sense arrives at what Bakhtin calls general literariness – i.e. the
standard. Guillory wrongly assumes that what Wordsworth meant by those impurities were provincialisms,
i.e. dialectal variation.

144
therefore refer not only to Synge’s translations but also to the implications which
translation as a creative strategy has for his dramatic works.
First and foremost, however, I want to start with Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of
the Translator’ since it talks directly to the main issue at hand: the literalness of
translation.
244
‘Translation is a mode’ – from this main tenet, Benjamin extracts the
concept of translatability. A work of art is translatable to the extent to which it asks to be
translated. This is a quality of the literary work which intensifies in its ‘afterlife’. Thus,
the statement that translatability is ‘an essential feature of certain works’
245
applies more
strongly to works with a significant after-life, i.e. precisely those masterpieces which
were the targets of Synge’s (as well as Lady Gregory’s) translation efforts. Canonicity
seems to be directly proportional to translatability. In all such long-lived works there is a
‘hidden significance’ which is over and above their meaning. The translation of this
significance, which is not equivalent to a transmission of subject matter, is the task of the
translator. The significance is not the meaning of the work but its participation in a much
larger relation: ‘a central reciprocal relation between languages’.
246
What does this mean?
Once a literary work is written, it starts its after-life. But since the particular language
in which it is written changes and since the language into which it is translated also

244
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Task of the Translator’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books:
New York, 1985, pp 69-82.

245
‘Task of the Translator’, in ibid., p. 71.

246
Ibid., p. 72.

145
changes,
247
there is much more to the linguistic make-up of the work than its meaning. It
enters into a universal relation as soon as it escapes the narrow confines of the immediate
language in which it was written (and due to linguistic change as well the very difference
in languages it must of necessity escape). There is a higher realm, Benjamin asserts,
where languages tend to supplement each other as they strive towards the state of ‘pure
language’. While each language is a different mode of intending reality, the fact of
intention (‘intensio’) itself is universal.
248
Translation amounts to a rendition of this
intention – hence the language of translation is always on the way to the pure language;
without managing to fully attain the status of absolute language, it is at least ‘an
embryonic attempt at making visible’
249
what is an otherwise hidden dynamic: the
tending towards the language of purity evident in both the language of the original and
the language of the translation. Translatability is then the capacity of a literary work to
enter this relation of supplementarity.
250

Translation is a ‘perpetual renewal of language’, a ‘revelation’ that languages are not as
remote as their irreconcilably different modes of intending reality seem to suggest. In the

247
‘While a poet’s words endure in his own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become
part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal. Translation is so far
removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it is the one
charged with the special mission of watching over the maturing process of the original language and the
birth pangs of its own.’ (Ibid., p. 73)

248
Ibid., pp 74, 76, 79.

249
Ibid., p. 72.

250
‘In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were. It cannot live there
permanently, to be sure, and it certainly does not reach it in its entirety. Yet, in a singularly impressive
manner, at least it points the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of
reconciliation and fulfillment of languages.’ (Ibid., p. 75)

146
higher realm of pure language, there is a deep ‘kinship’ which ‘does not necessarily
involve likeness.’ By pointing to this universal kinship (this reciprocal relation) among
languages, the translation supplements the original by letting it escape into the region of
absolute fulfillment. (‘While all individual elements of foreign languages – words,
sentences, structure – are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in
their intentions.’)
251

What does all this talk of absolute language mean in terms of practice? How does one
render the changed ‘tenor and significance of the great works of literature’ into the
‘mother tongue’? First of all, regarding the use of Hiberno-English, it should be noted
that it seems almost the ideal example of what Benjamin is talking about. Its very
existence is change and this makes it an ideal target language into which to translate the
change inherent in (the language of) great works of literature.
252
Conversely, employing a
language whose very condition of possibility is change is equivalent to a radical change
of the original work of literature. When that work is ‘great’, translation entails nothing
less than a revision of its greatness, its canonicity. If in translation ‘the great motif of
integrating many tongues into one true language is at work’, how is that to be achieved?
How is the target language to be allowed to ‘[ripen] the seed of pure language’ in the
translation?
253

251
Ibid., p. 74.

252
To quote Benjamin in full: ‘For just as the tenor and the significance of the great works of literature
undergo a complete transformation over the centuries, the mother tongue of the translator is transformed as
well.’ (Ibid., p. 73)

253
Ibid., p. 77.

147
Curiously, Benjamin – who more than once reiterates the idea that translation is not a
process of building equivalence of meaning – resorts to the strategy of literal translation.
Literalness ends up being the selected mode which would do justice to the spirit of
change at work in language. The nineteenth century had laughed at Hölderin’s translation
of Sophocles, with its direct rendering of syntax, but this is precisely the method
Benjamin advocates. One of the virtues of the ‘literal rendering of syntax’ is that it
‘completely demolishes the theory of reciprocation of meaning and is a direct threat to
comprehensibility… Thus no case for literalness can be based on a desire to retain the
meaning.’
254

What is retained in such a mode of translating is the idiom’s own power – not its
paraphrased meaning. This again suggests a belief in an absolute language
255
but also –
crucially for the Irish case – a refusal to let go of the original and a desire to set it free, to
let it escape into the realm of the pure. Amorous linguistic attachment to the Gaelic
substratum allowed the Irish to fashion a language (Hiberno-English) which is in its very
essence a translation. Without theory, they had done in the nineteenth century what the
nineteenth century, in its rejection of Hölderin, had thought of as ‘monstrous examples of
literalness’. (‘[A] translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must

254
Ibid., p. 78.

255
The Irish folks whose drive to acquisition had helped them develop a feeling for language in general
occupy the same space of absolute language. For the idea that speakers of Irish were restless exiles in
language as well as experts in linguistic position-taking, see p. 120 above.
148
lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both
the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language…’)
256

This type of literal translation Benjamin calls transparent – he sees that as the only
available option whereby intention may become linguistic matter in a different language:
A real translation is transparent
257
; it does not cover the original, does not block
its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium,
to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by
a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be
the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the
language of the original, literalness is the arcade.
258

Literal rendition taps into the original language – which Benjamin sometimes calls dead.
This dead language, like one of Kristeva’s mothers, lies crypto-hidden within the cache
of a culture’s heritage and is somehow accessible despite having been apparently
trampled underfoot.
259
A unique nexus is thus created: the colonized culture (the

256
Ibid., p. 78.

257
Transparency as a requirement of the translator is a term which can be used in a negative sense as well.
The notion of transparency in translation as it applies to Irish culture has received some attention. Both
David Lloyd and Michael Cronin assert the problematic nature of the insistence on an ideal equivalence in
translation. In their work, the term transparency corresponds not to Benjamin’s literalness (which is used in
a positive sense) but to the expectation that the source language has an ideal equivalent in the target
language. It is this same idea of equivalence of meaning which Benjamin rebels against in his essay. For
Cronin, ‘There often appears [in Irish historiography] to be an unspoken assumption of ideal equivalence.
Translation is a transparent, painless process and full equivalence is possible in the other language.
Questions of approximation, mistranslation, conceptual disparities and the consequences of language
transfer for self-representation are largely ignored.’ (Cronin, Michael, Translating Ireland. Translation,
Languages, Cultures, Cork University Press: Cork, Ireland, 1996, p. 5) David Lloyd has shown how
Mangan’s translations constitute a systematic subversion of the notion of transparency in the sense of ideal
equivalence (cf. Lloyd, David, Nationalism and Minor Literature. James Clarence Mangan and the
Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism, University of California Press: Berkeley, 1987).

258
Ibid., p. 79.

259
Gabriel Okara’s brief essay ‘African Speech …English Words’ (1963) takes up the idea of translation as
a modus operandi in fiction. He admits that ‘Between the birth of the idea and its translation into words,
something is lost.’ Despite this, ‘the only way to use them [i.e. African ideas, philosophy, folk-lore and
imagery] effectively is to translate them almost literally from the African language native to the writer into
149
original/dead language) persists in the language of the colonizer and creates its own
pocket there. Traversing the new language with the skills inherited from learning the
native language, it stakes off for itself its own foreign-own clearing. Luxuriating in the
clearing it has created for itself in a foreign land, this dialectal excrescence is a thorn in
the flesh of the accepted standard. Little by little, the diseased outgrowth comes to define
the common language. First it submits, then it strikes back imperceptibly as the nibbling
of a multitude of ants working on a fallen trunk. Indeed, Synge’s dramatic work as a
whole can be viewd in this light. From the shy formality of In the Shadow to the strategic
position-taking in The Tinker’s Wedding to the confident explosion of demotic lyricism in
The Playboy, Synge’s stage language represents an attempt not only to expose the
translatability of established dramatic forms (e.g. tragedy, comedy) but also to approach
the realm of the absolute. It is from this ‘pure’ (but also highy hybrid) linguistic position
that the dialect of the plays begins to strike back until it becomes a definitive signature
both of Synge’s style (let us call it Synge-speak) and of the common language more
generally.
We see then that Synge works under Benjamin’s absolutist premise of the mechanism
of literal translation – the assumption that the expression of the substratum will take care
of itself provided that language is left to its own devices in a literal-style translation.

whatever European language he is using as his medium of expression…In order to capture the vivid images
of African speech, I had to eschew the habit of expressing my thoughts first in English. It was difficult at
first, but I had learn I had to study each Ijaw expression I used and to discover the probable situation in
which it was used in order to bring out the nearest meaning in English. I found it a fascinating exercise.’
(Rotten English, pp 475-7) Okara concludes: ‘Why shouldn’t there be a Nigerian or West African English
which we can use to express our own ideas, thinking and philosophy in our own way?’(Ibid., p. 479). With
Lady Gregory, we can ask Why should there be no Kiltartanese?

150
Ethos will out! It will not change with the change of the sounds and the alphabet.
Ultimately, this implies that what matters is language, not individual languages. Thus, the
search for one’s own language takes place in a space of absolute language, which is, as it
were, before and outside of all particular languages.
***
Michael Cronin delineates two views of translation in Irish historiography. On the one
hand, translation promotes understanding, and in Irish culture (where translation was a
necessity) this was of the utmost historical importance. Translation in this view is a
‘bridge between cultures’ while ‘equivalence is difficult but possible’. The other view
holds that languages are expressive of national genius, hence it is impossible to translate
the Irish spirit in another language. In this view, ‘translation is coercive. It is a strategy by
the colonizer to assimilate the language of the colonized and deny their right to be
different and free.’
260
As Cronin shows, none of these views captures the revolutionary
work of translators like Hyde, Synge and Lady Gregory.
At first sight, Hyde, the pioneer of literary Anglo-Irish dialect, seems to indicate a
happy compromise between the two views. His preface to the Love Songs advertises the
virtues of literal translation whereby a cultural bridge is built despite the coercive need to
use English:
This I do not wholly regret [having to translate from the Gaelic original into
English]; for the literal translation of these songs will, I hope, be of some
advantage to that at present increasing class of Irishmen who take a just pride in
their native language, and to those foreigners who great philologists and
etymologists as they are, find themselves hampered in their pursuits through

260
Translating Ireland, p. 124.

151
unavoidable ignorance of modern Irish idiom which can only be correctly
interpreted by the native speakers, who are, alas! becoming fewer and fewer
every day.
261

A closer look at Hyde’s achievement, however, changes the meaning of the word
‘advantage’. As Cronin notes
262
, the decisive difference between Hyde’s literalism and
that of previous translators (such as Sigerton) is that the target language becomes
crucially affected by the translation. Instead of looking for the ideal equivalent, for the
transparent word, this direct translation – importing as it does the sound system, syntax
and phraseology
263
of the source language into the target language – subverts the latter,
changing it, as it were, to reflect the original. The subversive potential of this
translational aesthetic did not escape authors like Synge and Lady Gregory who were
looking to forge a distinctive language which would not hide the fact that it is a
translation but would openly advertise the source language as a substratum. In Cronin’s
words, ‘literalism in translation can be seen to have both a conservative and a subversive
function’
264
– the latter function consists in the fact that translation allows ‘the target
language, the language of the colonizer, to be colonised in its turn by the language of the
colonised.’
265

261
Cf. Abhráin Grádh Chúige Connacht (Love Songs of Connacht), with an introduction by Mícheál Ó
hAodha, Irish University Press: Shannon, Ireland, 1969, ‘Preface’, n. p.

262
Ibid., p. 136.

263
Literal translation of phraseology is known as calquing; the resulting phrases are calques.

264
Ibid., p. 136.

265
Ibid., p. 141.

152
Synge was drawn to Hyde’s literal method
266
and, as Declan Kiberd explains, on his
visits to the Aran Islands, he ‘was able to note the similarity between Hyde’s prose
commentaries and the sort of English spoken by recent learners of that language.’ ‘What
struck him most was …that the people were themselves already consummate self-
translators…’ The experience of the shock of the hybrid English used by Hyde coupled
with the further proof Synge received first-hand allowed his method to crystallize.
267

Unlike previous translators striving for an ideal equivalence (a ‘bad premise’, according
to Kiberd), the Irish renaissance authors allowed the English language to be ‘massively
remoulded by the source language.’
268
Far from being a representation of ‘Paddy the
Irishman’ who by necessity minces his words and mishandles the language of the master,
the language of these translations boldly announces its own hybridity. ‘Instead of
concealing translation, the process was now foregrounded in the public search for a new

266
In the almost nonchalant last sentence of his preface to his Poems and Translations, Synge, like Hyde
and Benjamin, invokes literalism as a viable translation mode. ‘The translations are sometime free and
sometimes almost literal, according as seemed most fitting with the form of language I have used.’ See
‘Preface’ in ‘Poems’, p. 4 (The Works of J. M. Synge. Volume Two, John W. Luce and Company: Boston,
1912)

267
Kiberd, Declan, Irish Classics, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001, p. 314. As
Kiberd puts it, ‘Synge’s own translations were based on methods very like Hyde’s. Because he was still
learning Irish on Aran, he translated with a word-for-word literalism, much as the islanders themselves
were doing… Undaunted, he tried to capture the music along with the words without adding anything.’

268
Ibid., pp 314-5. In similar vein, M. NourbeSe Philip, in her essay ‘The Absence of Writing or How I
Almost Became a Spy’ (1993), adds a violent dimension to the use of hybrid English for literary purposes.
It is not enough, in her view, to let language take its natural course. The necessary attrition of English
which the submerged core produces as it makes contact with the target language must be supplemented
with an even more palpably expressionistic technique of explosion: ‘It is not sufficient, however, to write
only in dialect, for too often that remains a parallel and closed experience. Neither is it sufficient to write
only in what we have come to call standard English. The language as we know it has to be dislocated and
acted upon – even destroyed – so that it begins to serve our purposes.’ (Rotten English, p. 492)

153
literary idiom.’
269
This seems to be the answer to the much controverted issue concerning
the possibility of expressing Irish essence in the English language. The direct translation
of the Irish (source) substratum manages to keep the thought intact since the target
language (the super-stratum) is not allowed to dominate.
The fact that this half-way house was not palatable to purists on both sides (i.e. both
English and Irish/Gaelic) points to the revolutionary character of the venture. The Irish
renaissance writers shared the strong faith in translation of the Young Irelanders who
believed that ‘an Irish nation can express its own distinctness in the English language.’
270

But unlike their predecessors, the translations of Synge and Gregory had an additional
crucial function. As Cronin puts it regarding the work of Lady Gregory:
Translating Molière into ‘Kiltartan’ is an act of cultural self-confidence. It
implies that Hiberno-English is a fit vehicle for one of the greatest playwrights
of the European literary tradition… The translation of Molière into ‘Kiltartan’,
rather than British English, is replicating the initial Tudor ‘conquest’ of the
classics through translation that is at the heart of rising linguistic self-confidence
in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England.
271

269
Translating Ireland, p. 144. Yeats was also part of this communal moving towards a shared target. He is
an interesting in-between example: he had little Irish, a bit more Hiberno-English, and a lot of enthusiasm
for things Irish. He too felt that you can distill Irish essence outside of the Irish language. The fact that he
did not acquire Hiberno-English, however, need not mean that he was not steeped in it at times. Nor should
literal translation be taken too literally. There is no guarantee, nor should there be, that so-called direct
translations are pure constructs. A whole new area of possibilities and gradations of translatability opens up
if one includes ‘fake’ translations into the equation: i.e. translations which announce their ‘literal/direct’
status but which are ultimately neither literal nor one hundred percent direct. Synge’s intensified dialectal
speech seems to fit this pattern. Often, he deliberately selected a phrase just because it sounded like a literal
translation from the substratum but was in fact more Irish than the actual Irish equivalent. Extending
Charles Nada’s paradoxical formulation (a translation should not look like a translation yet a translation
should look like a translation), we may posit a not-so-direct/’fake’ translation which looks like a direct
translation.

270
Ibid., p. 116.

271
Ibid., p. 140.
154
What I want to claim is that by translating great works of literature, authors like Hyde,
Synge and Gregory were in a crucial sense modifying the notion of what constituted
literary language. The translation work of Synge and Lady Gregory, in particular,
manages to deconstruct inherited models of canonical literary value and of literariness. It
is significant, in this connection, that Synge and Gregory translated European canonical
works in an attempt to trace a hitherto untraced streak in the genealogy of literariness – a
sort of parallel literary universe which starts at the very juncture when European
vernaculars were only beginning to establish themselves as the accepted prestige variety
vis-à-vis Latin. By literally re-discovering some of these celebrated origins of canonical
literariness (the works of Petrarch, Molière and Villon for instance), the two Irish authors
seemed to imply at least the possibility of a different model of canonicity. In an important
sense then, the translation of, say, Petrarch into Hiberno-English amounts to more than
just linguistic terrorism.
272
As Declan Kiberd has said:
These exercises [in translation] were far more successful than many standard
English versions of the work of these poets. This genius went far deeper than a
conventional flair for turning a piece of Irish poetry or prose into English. It
involved a capacity to project a whole Gaelic culture in English.
273

272
M. NourbeSe Philip, in her essay ‘The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy’ (1993),
adds a further dimension to the use of hybrid English for literary purposes. It is not enough, in her view, to
let language take its natural course. The necessary attrition of English which the submerged core produces
as it makes contact with the target language must be supplemented with an even more palpably
expressionistic technique of explosion: ‘It is not sufficient, however, to write only in dialect, for too often
that remains a parallel and closed experience. Neither is it sufficient to write only in what we have come to
call standard English. The language as we know it has to be dislocated and acted upon – even destroyed –
so that it begins to serve our purposes.’ (Rotten English, p. 492)

273
Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996, p. 626.

155
One could go even further and claim that a whole new culture is projected back onto
the original culture. This is quite in line with the philological spirit of Synge’s overall
work. That spirit relies on comparative linguistic and cultural analysis of the past. In
many ways, Synge’s translations bring the Italian and Irish traditions closer together by
leapfrogging a whole English tradition of literary translations of Petrarch. The
diaphanous love poetry of the original Italian is rendered via the earthy materiality of the
Anglo-Irish dialect. At first sight, the language of the translations sounds slightly odd, but
once the ear gets accustomed to this defamiliarized Pertrach, the dialect begins to expand
its limits and reach back in time to a distant sensibility. It is the sincere rendering of
Petrarch as defamiliarized that draws him much closer to us than, say, the sentimentalized
Petrarch of the Victorian tradition.
274

Instead of trying to replicate the complex rhyme schemes of the original, Synge reverts
to prose in order to translate the urgency of the emotion. The result is a prose-poetry
hybrid whose emotional intensity Wordsworth would approve of.
275
Instead of sounding
awkward, the Hiberno-English of the lover’s lament for the lost Laura begins to redefine
the original’s translatability
276
by adding a unique sense of rhythm to the poems. The
cadences are clearly Hiberno-English, and this, paradoxically, makes them all the more
convincing.

274
In many cases, the Canzionere ‘was diluted into sentimental effusion as a series of minor poets recreate
Petrarch as a cut-price Werther.’ (Classe, Olive, ed., Encyclopedia of Literary Translation. Vol. 2, Fitzroy
Dearborn Publishers: London, 2000, p. 1071)

275
For a discussion of Wordsworth’s association of prose with sincere feeling, see section below.

276
In Benjamin’s sense of the word (see discussion above).

156
LAURA BEING DEAD, PETRARCH FINDS TROUBLE IN ALL THE THINGS OF
THE EARTH

Life is flying from me, not stopping an hour, and Death is making great strides
following my track. The days about me and the days passed over me, are bringing me
desolation, and the days to come will be the same surely.
All things that I am bearing in mind, and all things I am in dread of, are keeping me in
troubles, in this way one time, in that way another time, so that if I wan’t taking pity on
my own self, it’s long ago I’d have given up my life.
If my dark heart has any sweet thing it is turned away from me, and then farther off I
see the great winds where I must be sailing. I see my good luck far away in the harbour,
but my steersman is tired out, and the masts and the ropes on them are broken, and the
beautiful lights where I would be always looking are quenched.
277

The cadence of ‘will be the same surely’ renders the fatality of the situation better than
any precisionist translation aiming for direct semantic or prosodic correspondence. If read
with the pacy tempo typical of a lot of Synge’s dramatic dialogs, the lament seems to
grow in urgency. The phrasal verbs and the contractions suggest a spontaneous outflow
of emotion, and here Synge seems to be following Wordsworth’s recipe once more. The
sense of reality is perhaps strongest in the phrase: ‘If my dark heart has any sweet thing
in it, it is turned away from me.’ This is clearly no longer the pre-Raphaelite, daintily
archaic Petrarch but a voice embodied and naturalized.
HE IS JEALOUS OF THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH

What a grudge I am bearing the earth that has its arms about her, and is holding that
face away from me, where I was finding peace from great sadness.
What a grudge I am bearing the Heavens that are after taking her, and shutting her in
with greediness, the Heavens that do push their bolt against so many.
What a grudge I am bearing the blessed saints that have got her sweet company, that I
am always seeking; and what a grudge I am bearing against Death, that is standing in her
two eyes, and will not call me with a word.
278

277
The Works of John M. Synge, Vol. 2, Poems, p. 31.

278
Ibid., p. 36.

157
This self-absorbed series of expostulations would threaten to sound really stilted if
rendered by anything that looks like a standard poeticism. At the same time, it is hard to
imagine a more chilling and immediate representation of the lover’s sadness than the one
achieved by the simple phrase ‘standing in her two eyes’ (the same eyes that the lover
had praised in numerous poems, e.g. Canzone IX and X, Sonnets LV, CCXXIII).
Perhaps a comparison of Synge’s translation of a sonnet to that of Francis Wrangham
(1769 – 1842) would serve best to show the different conception of what constitutes
literary language.
Synge:

HE ASKS HIS HEART TO RAISE ITSELF UP TO GOD.

What is it you're thinking, lonesome heart? For what is it you're turning back ever and
always to times that are gone away from you? For what is it you're throwing sticks on the
fire when it is your own self that is burning?
279

Wrangham:
HE ENCOURAGES HIS SOUL TO LIFT ITSELF TO GOD, AND TO ABANDON
THE VANITIES OF EARTH.

WHAT thou? think'st thou? wherefore bend thine eye
Back on the time that never shall return?
The raging fire, where once 'twas thine to burn,
Why with fresh fuel, wretched soul, supply?
280

In place of the more neutral ‘fuel’, Synge has quite simply ‘sticks’. The self-searching of
the original poem is much more contextualized, and therefore more immediate, than in

279
Ibid., p. 32.

280
Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374, The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch, translated into
English verse by various hands, with ‘A Life of the Poet’ by Thomas Campbell, George Bell and Sons:
London, 1879, p. 241.

158
Wrangham’s translation where the fire, although ‘raging’, never manages to get
“translated” with quite the same convincing power that the Hiberno-English conveys.
Synge’s Petrarch is more convincing because he is given a more earthy voice. The
language of the mourner’s complaint is rendered as petulant self-deprecation and this
creates a sense of reality of the lament. One can almost hear the voice of a distracted
keener breaking from his keen to argue with finely chopped logic precisely at the moment
of greatest tragedy. This is not the feeling one gets from Wrangham’s translation, where
the mourning voice is more distanced while its toil is more artificial because more
deliberate.
Here is the remaining part of the same poem as it was translated by Synge and
Wrangham respectively.
Synge:

The little looks and sweet words you've taken one by one and written down among your
songs, are gone up into the Heavens, and it's late, you know well, to go seeking them on
the face of the earth.
Let you not be giving new life every day to your own destruction, and following a
fool's thoughts for ever. Let you seek Heaven when there is nothing left pleasing on the
earth, and it a poor thing if a great beauty, the like of her, would be destroying your peace
and she living or dead.
281

Wrangham:

Those thrilling tones, those glances of the sky,
Which one by one thy fond verse strove to adorn,
Are fled; and—well thou knowest, poor forlorn!—
To seek them here were bootless industry.
Then toil not bliss so fleeting to renew;
To chase a thought so fair, so faithless, cease:
Thou rather that unwavering good pursue,

281
Op. cit., p. 32.

159
Which guides to heaven; since nought below can please.
Fatal for us that beauty's torturing view,
Living or dead alike which desolates our peace.
282

The implications of Synge’s translation work do not get exhausted with the mere
statement that he was trying to test the limits of the Hiberno-English dialect. In many
ways, literariness – a quality which Petrarch (possessing as he does a high degree of
translatability) almost automatically brings to the table – is reflected back onto the
language of the Irish folk. Again, a statement is made in the spirit of comparative
philology: that a residue of “literariness” is to be found in the language of the Irish poor.
That a parallel tradition, no less distinguished than the literary tradition, had been leading
its secluded existence – and to tap into it is, in a sense, to enter a possible world where
the literary tradition would have developed differently. Thus, by his translations, Synge
does nothing less than interogate the very logic of the accrual of canonical value to
literary works.
***
To appreciate Synge’s subversion of the very concept of literariness, we must examine
one more area of influence which has already been mentioned and which was crucial to
his development as a writer (namely, nineteenth-century philology) as well as briefly
trace two moments in literary history (i.e. Wordsworth’s theory of poetic language and
William Barnes’s acoustic experiments with the Dorset dialect). These concerns will
occupy us in the next two sections.

282
Op. cit., p. 241.
160
Philology is of course a science which Synge studied, and I will be mostly interested in
the idea of a return to the origin of language and, generally speaking, the etymological
spirit of Synge’s plays. Philologists thought of dialects as the next best available option in
the absence of direct access to the primordial motivated language which was a natural
reflection of reality. Much ink was spilt in the nineteenth century as to what such a
reflection meant and how it could be re-discovered given that modern languages are
hopelessly stuck in arbitrary convention. By implication, dialects represented an escape
from correct or standard language. In their polymorphous perverse orality, they had a
potential to subvert literary convention.
Wordsworth’s theory of literary language posits a return to the interjectional
outspokenness of sincerely felt (‘real’) language. Although he is not concerned with
using dialect in his poetry, he is a precursor of modernists like Synge in that he insisted
not so much on a literal importation of actual peasant speech but on the enrichment of
literary language with distilled qualities which Wordsworth thought of as inherent to
‘rustic’ speech. In other words, he serves as an important example of what it means to
appropriate the figure of the folk in an argument about poetic language. In his particular
case, this argument is aimed as a critique against established literary convention.
Barnes’s work with dialect, itself carried out in the spirit of philology, simply alerts us
to the use of dialect for the purposes of launching an acoustic broadside at the standard
language. His hybrid English is a radical distortion of standard phonetics, and it is
acoustics which forms no small part of Synge’s literary dialect.

161
Dialects of Paradise
‘The real and natural life of language is in its dialects, a name which in its widest sense
comprises provincialism, brogue, patois, jargon, or any other variety that affects the
general progress of language down to the idiom of families and individuals’.
283
Max
Müller’s opinions on language were influential as well as indicative of the 19th century
thirst for broad speculations on the nature and origin of language and on language’s
relation to culture at large. Seeking to correct the misconception that ‘dialects are
everywhere corruptions of the literary language’, Müller asserts that to claim that dialects
are ‘mere modifications’ of the literary language is one of the ‘most fatal mistakes in the
science of language’. Instead of a corruption, dialect is in fact a source of linguistic life
and vigor:
In England, the local patois have many forms which are more primitive than the
language of Shakespeare, and the richness of their vocabulary surpasses, on
many points, that of the classical writers of any period.’ Dialects are vital
sources of literary language, ‘parallel stems which existed long before the time
when one of them was raised to that temporary eminence which is the result of
literary cultivation.
284

Even more crucial is the idea of an original multiplicity of variants. Arguing against
Grimm who had said that ‘all multiplicity arises gradually from an original unity’, Müller
finds that, on the contrary, multiplicity and variation are conditions of language per se:
‘The very nature of speech therefore would lead to dialectic variety.’
285
Grimm’s

283
The Science of Language: Founded on Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution in 1861 and 1863, 2
vols., New York, 1891, 1:55.

284
Ibid., pp 58-9.

285
Ibid., p. 62.

162
conclusion about the apparent gradual development of dialects from one language is
based on a simplistic reading of the facts of history. While it is true that, as Grimm knew,
‘the more we look back in the history of language the smaller is their [i.e. dialects’]
number’, Müller goes further to speculate a priori on the reason for that: raising one
dialect to the ‘dignity of a literary language’ is concomitant to a parallel exclusion from
the literary archives of all other dialects. But this process is not equivalent to a veritable
extirpation of dialects. The process of suppression along the hierarchy of literariness does
not indicate that local varieties should have been promptly ‘silenced and strangled like
the brothers and playfellows of a Turkish sultan.’
286
The fact that we lack written records
of dialects does not allow one to refuse them a parallel, and vital, existence. Indeed,
Müller invites the philologist to look away from the evidence of the archives in favor of a
polymorphous and ongoing orality of the folk. The implication is that parallel traditions
to the literary tradition are just as important as the mainstream texts for our
understanding of language.
The main thrust of his cum laude on dialect as an underground vital current under the
frozen ice of the standard is uncannily to the point in the Irish case. One way or another,
‘the popular dialects will sooner or later assert their ascendancy.’
287
The ice will break
and the vital currents will continue their surging forth into new channels and territories.
288

286
Ibid., p. 60.

287
Ibid., p. 61.

288
In the case of Irish English in particular, this breaking of the ice is even more interesting: breaking into
inter-language, this non-standard variety of English shares with dialects the persistent and tenacious
capability of survival of folk speech.

163
Müller’s whole argument depends on the ability to look away from the written to the
spoken. Looking for evidence for his otherwise a priori argument in ‘accounts which
missionaries give us of languages which are still, so to say, in the state of nature, spoken,
not written, and which they could watch in their transition to a literary stage’, Müller
establishes an oft-rehearsed parallel between the tribal folk as language-makers and the
ancient folk of history from whom ‘we’ have inherited our civilization. What is
interesting is that, much like latter-day folklore, these pre-literary languages are just so
just now attaining the qualities of standards; loosen your grip on this fulminating verbal
mass, and it is gone through the fingers. These tribes, ‘still being in a dialectic stage of
language,’
289
are the folk in transition: about to lose some aspect of its existence – but not
quite as yet. Watching the transition from dialect to literary language as it happens allows
the cultural and linguistic mythographer to draw important parallels to the processes of
codification at work in Western culture.
But these parallels betray one occluded essential difference. Even Müller’s cited source
(Mr. Gill’s account) implies a yearning for the pastoral pre-literary idyll of tribal culture.
Fixing a term by giving it currency is described as a natural process of codification by
word of mouth. This folkish mechanism of transmission of a standard language is a far
cry from the centralized attempts at standardization of Europe’s major languages. Both
Renaissance and 19th century efforts, to take only the case of English as an example,
amount to the prescription of bookish and elitist ideals of grammatical correctness, purity
of the standard language, fixation on the written, etc. On the other hand, the islanders

289
Ibid., p. 62.

164
came close to a democratic forging of their own speech. Language change occurred
through such natural processes as loss of teeth on the part of the elders
290
leading to
variant pronunciations, spontaneous effusions of witticisms by the chiefs codified by
continuous oral citation, and new arrivals on the island in drift canoes importing foreign
terms. Yet an inevitable elitism creeps in even here:
The same excellent missionary…told me how, at the time of his arrival in that
island, several local different dialects were spoken there, but that through his
learning one of them and using it for his translations and in his schools, this so-
called missionary dialect has become the recognized language of the whole
population.
291

Even in Eden the language-maker was also a language-taker.

Ultimately, Müller recognizes the impossibility of tracing the processes by which
common speech was precipitated into a standard. Much like the bulk of 19th century
discussions of the origin of language, the speculative analysis of language change (in this
case from dialect to literary, from free-flowing to fixed) is a nostalgic look over the
shoulder back to a pre-literary dispensation. The brunt of such “scholarly” reasoning
often fell on a glorification of the folk’s capacity to make language. In this important
aspect, philological thinking was a definitive influence on Synge. The poet, as a
philologist, constantly imagines a folk in the state of sensuous phonoligizing living in a
linguistic pandemonium all the more interesting for its anarchical arrangement.

290
An elite’s self-serving, but otherwise arbitrary, criteria in selecting a prestige dialect leave the populace
stuck with a toothless standard.

291
Ibid., p. 64.

165
The Aran islands, particularly Inishmaan, are imagined as a kind of philological retreat
where the people reciprocate the linguistic interest of the visitors most of whom, Synge
claims, are here as ‘philological students’. The islanders themselves welcome this
linguistic interest thinking that the whole outside world exists primarily to study their
language. They eagerly respond to their guests’ interest by engaging in “philological”
discussion.‘Foreign langauages are another favourite topic… They sometimes ask me the
French for simple phrases, and when they have listened to the intonation for a moment,
most of them are able to reproduce it with admirable precision.’
292

At first Gaelic is described by Synge as a ‘drone’ or ‘murmur’ which merges with other
noises to form the general soundscape of the islands. Alongside the noise of Gaelic, there
is Hiberno-English in its various degrees of hybridity. It is interesting to study Synge’s
linguistic position vis-à-vis his informants some of whom were surprisingly proficient in
English while others had only a few words at their disposal. In all cases, there is a strong
sense of traversing a complex linguistic space with all the risks and uncertainties that this
entails. This sense of disorientation continues for a while until we come to the second
major story told to Synge by one of the islanders. This is the story which would
eventually become the plot for In the Shadow of the Glen, and here, all of a sudden, we
wake up to the fact that the text as whole must be a performance – a very special type of
ethnography in which the philological interest is a key component. A conflict arises: on
the one side is the verbal ability of story-tellers in Hiberno-English, on the other, the
inarticulate sounds of Gaelic. One the one side, the desire to probe into Müller’s natural

292
The Aran Islands, p. 21, in op. cit., vol. 4.
166
state of man, before ‘the tyranny exercised by the literary idiom’, on the other, the
realization that an imaginative return back in time or an actual ethnographic visit to
distant islands or, more conveniently, to dialect-speaking pockets of a country, cannot
yield the desired natural language. Failing that, Synge, like Müller, settles for a not-yet-
artificial language which could be observed in the process of its becoming. Thus the
folk’s efforts to make a language out of their substratum, is mirrored by Synge’s desire to
create his own stage language – not yet artificial – and in turn, both efforts echo nature’s
capacity to make meaning out of inarticulate sounds.
Synge’s persistence in seeking this unborn language parallels Müller’s philological
obstinacy. ‘What we are accustomed to call languages, the literary idioms of Greece and
Rome and India…must be considered as artificial, rather than as natural forms of speech.’
The parallel existence of variants of language is based on the realization that ‘[i]t is really
a mere accident that language should ever have been reduced to writing.’
293
True, this
accident has removed us even farther from the natural state, but just the mere fact that it
is an accident opens the door for a speculative visit to the house of the folk where dialects
‘live on in full vigor’
294
and are still the organic (non-accidental and motivated)
expression of the folk in their own voice. Instead of a wish-washy capitulation to the fact
that all language is constructed, we see, in much of 19th century philology, as well as in
Synge’s account of his experience on the Aran islands, an obstinate attempt to probe deep

293
The Science of Language, pp 54-5.

294
Ibid., pp 60-1.

167
into language, to look for an essential core or origin. And this core is relatively more
accessible in the language of the common folk.
As I lie here hour after hour, I seem to enter into the wild pastimes of the cliff,
and to become a companion of the cormorants and crows … Their language is
easier than Gaelic, and I seem to understand the greater part of their cries,
though I am not able to answer. There is one usual plaintive note which they
take up in the middle of their usual babble with extraordinary effect, and pass on
from one another along the cliff with a sort of an inarticulate wail, as if they
remembered for an instant the horror of the mist.
295

This is the edenic space before language, or rather before signification. The sounds of
nature merge with the language of the people in a harmonious whole. And it is in this pre-
literate setting that Synge’s subversive literariness is born, as it were onomatopoeically.
Prompted by the babblings of nature, the attention of the listener awakes to the melody of
the islanders’ speech: ‘Yet is is only in the intonation of a few sentences or some old
fragment of melody that I catch the real spirit of the island…’
296
Faint echoes, inarticulate
cries, natural sounds, and ominous noises harmonize with the human sounds to make one
common melody. Synge is particularly keen on describing the keening of mourners.
Each old woman, as she took her turn in the leading recitative, seemed possessed
for the moment with a profound ecstasy of grief, swaying to and fro, and
bending her forehead to the stone before her, while she called out to the dead
with a perpetually recurring chant of sobs.
297

The technical terms (recitative and chant) do not sit oddly in this dramatic account but
suggest that Synge was always thinking of theatrical performance, of the language to be
used in his plays, of the invention of a literariness which could capture the melody of a

295
The Aran Islands, pp 48-9.

296
Ibid., p. 49.

297
Ibid., p. 51.
168
pre-literary dispensation. As we shall see in the next chapter, the ‘chant’, in particular,
can be understood in a rather special sense and was a common pursuit of Irish
renaissance authors. In these early passages, we hear a language just about to be born,
and in this, Synge’s account is a performative echo of Müller’s edenic philology.
And yet, as we saw already, side by side with this inarticulate language of nature, there
is the masterful articulacy of the islanders’ story-telling. It was the resolution of this
conflict which would help Synge forge his stage dialect.
Tongues of the Common Folk
What does it mean for a poet to recruit the figure of the folk in an argument against
dead metaphor? This is the light in which I want to examine Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to
Lyrical Ballads’ and Coleridge’s response to it in Biographia Literaria (chapters xvii-
xviii). The main idea I wish to put forward is that Wordsworth’s purported veneration of
‘rustic’ speech boils down to a recipe in imaginative distillation of qualities which are
described as pertaining to the folk. But, in this argument, the folk is only a fictional
character – a carrier of crucial qualities, and it would be mistaken to read Wordsworth’s
reference to the language really used by men in the literal way in which Coleridge reads it.
Wordsworth is talking about a sort of translation of the folk’s essence – not a direct
translation or importation of real-life speech – at a time when poetic diction was
beginning to seem too mechanical as well as too all-pervasive. It was a time for change,
and when Wordsworth was called upon to explain his method he sought resort to the
figure of the folk – a logical center in his argument about how to innovate literary
language.
169
Like Synge in his preface to the Playboy, Wordsworth’s reference to real rustic speech
has caused much confusion. In a way this is understandable: any poet who announces that
he will deliberately take from the folk should expect to be closely examined for
verisimilitude.
298
But just like Synge’s work with peasant speech, Wordsworth’s method,
as it is set out in the ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, involves a process of distillation or
selection – a kind of heightening of language.
299
Like Synge, Wordsworth was interested
in real speech to the extent to which it constituted a rebellion against standards of
literariness. (The fact that Synge went much further in actually reproducing real peasant
speech is a side issue here.) Wordsworth’s investment in the real language of man is a
choice made expressly against the stagnant currents of 18-th century rule-based poetic
diction. In place of the never-so-well expressed, the Preface proposed a simplicity in
poetry. This is the first crucial quality of language as it is really spoken which is said to
inhere in the kind of poetry that is open to a sublimated use (as opposed to a direct
imitation) of real-life speech. In this context, the folkish poet’s task is to merge with the
folk.
300
That this folk is otherwise unqualified (i.e. except by the crucial qualities he

298
Synge’s statement that he did not use anything the peasants themselves did not say set a whole chain
reaction of literary criticism as to the reality or otherwise of his stage dialect.

299
Alan Bliss is one of a number of scholars who talk about ‘selection’ and ‘distillation’ in Synge’s use of
peasant speech. (Bliss, Alan, The Language of Synge, pp 35 – 62, op. cit.)

300
John Guillory reads the ‘poet of the Preface as the protagonist of a submerged pastoral narrative. The
poet is “distinguished from other men” but not linguistically; he moves among them as though he were one
of them, speaking their language, and he only signals his difference by the choice of meter, the signal or
signature of the poetic sensibility.’ I doubt that meter is the only difference (given that Wordsworth goes to
great lengths to explain the poetic sensibility in ways which have nothing to do with meter) but the larger
point still stands: Wordsworth’s ‘narrative … reinscribes the major topos of Renaissance pastoral – the poet
as peasant…’ (See, Cultural Capital, p. 128)

170
carries) is to be expected from a strategically drawn conceptual center of a highly
contrived argument about poetics.
301

Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the
essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their
maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic
language; because in that condition our elementary feelings coexist in a state of
greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated …
because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings …
The language, too, of these men has been adopted … because such men
communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is
originally derived…
302

Thus, we see that the ‘rustic’ folk (never mentioned by name in the ‘Preface’) is only a
representation of a bundle of decisive qualities: simplicity; elemental power of perception
of the physical world due to a close relation to nature; sincerity; freedom from restraint; a
lack of artifice (a crucial quality vis-à-vis the artificiality of polite diction); a vigorous
outspokenness which may be designated as the interjectional aspect of language activated
when one reacts to real danger, pain, etc.; reality (as opposed to the poetic capacity to
recollect experiences from memory). The list is not exhaustive, but the point is that
Wordsworth saw in ‘rustic’ life and speech an explanatory figure of speech which would
help him to draw closer to the kind of qualities he was looking for in a poetry which was
consciously pitted against ruling conventions of the day. The whole point was to come up
with a language which would take him away from the stilted language of classicists with

301
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when anthropology was achieving the status of a dominant
science, a set of assumptions would turn this idealized linguistic picture into a happy ethnographic scenario;
some of these assumptions include: that the poet has easy access to the real-but-heightened language of
men, that he is like an easily portable empty slate written on by the natural poets of the countryside, that the
heightened state of the folk possesses the quality of transmissibility to the cultivated seat of the observer.

302
Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. Nowell Smith, Humphrey Milford: London, 1925, p. 14.

171
its ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’
303
. “Real” speech – with its immediacy and natural
vigor – seemed an attractive alternative. It should be noted here that the rustic is itself
only a metaphor for the ‘real’ which is ultimately the quality Wordsworth sought. In
place of ‘false refinement’, ‘fickle tastes’ and ‘arbitrary innovation’, we have an ‘organic
sensibility’, ‘emphatic language’ and ‘repeated experience’.
304

Objects, perceived naturally, excite feelings more strongly and carry with themselves a
‘purpose’. The poet, however, unlike this imaginatively constructed natural poet (this
pastoral folk figure whom Coleridge mistook for a real persona) cannot hope to
purposefully recollect an experience with the same effect which the experience has in real
life. The category of the real (which stands also for the impassioned conception of the
object) remains the unachievable target of the poetic sensibility. However, Wordsworth
provides an opening: through training (i.e. ‘repetition and continuance of this act [of
contemplation]’), the poetic sensibility can become accustomed to reaching a version of
this unachievable immediacy (i.e. reality) of perception – what results is a similar
impassioned response to the one which lived experiences provide. The crucial property of
this trained sensibility is that it allows the poetic mind ‘by obeying blindly and
mechanically the impulses of those habits’ to describe (poetically) objects in such a way
as to excite the imagination of the reader.
305
This almost mechanical obedience to the

303
Ibid., p. 13.

304
Ibid., pp 14-5.

305
Ibid., p. 16. This is a rare instance of a positive use of the word “mechanical”. Usually Wordsworth uses
it to designate the automatic artificiality of poetic diction (e.g. in his essay on epitaphs, he calls the
construction of poetry ‘mechanical’ where ‘words [do] their own work and one half of the line
manufactur[es] the rest.’ (cf. ‘Upon Epitaphs’ (2), in ibid., p 122)
172
poetic sensibility seems to be nothing other than a trained intuition. While the pastoral
folk has a natural intuition, the poet can achieve a similar capability through a process of
training whereby the conscious habit becomes unconscious. There is nothing so
remarkable about this formulation, and I have dwelled on it only to show that, once gain,
a crucial quality (i.e. intuition) is borrowed from the bundle of qualities associated with
the fictional figure of the folk. In other words, the poet is allowed yet again to merge with
the folk.
Wordsworth of course knows that such an intuitive folk does not exist in real life and
that rustic existence is not inherently poetic in the sense of being a perfected sensibility.
But the pastoral folk does have simplicity and passion, and Wordsworth wastes no time
to recruit this imaginary figure for the radical project of revising both critical convention
and the very idea of canonicity. ‘If my conclusions are admitted, and carried as far as
they must be carried if admitted at all, our judgments concerning the works of the greatest
Poets both ancient and modern will be far different from what they are at present.’ Even
more, ‘Now these men [i.e. critics who stumble upon prosaisms] would establish a canon
of criticism which the Reader will conclude he must utterly reject, if he wishes to be
pleased with these volumes.’
306

In this latter argument, Wordsworth seems to be revising the very concept of
literariness. In place of ‘ornament’ he stresses directness (as in folk speech); instead of
the cold calculation of poetic diction, he valorizes the poetic voice ‘which the passion

306
Ibid., pp 22, 19.

173
naturally suggests.’
307
In the passage (quoted above) which gives the reason why rustic
life was chosen, one cannot fail to notice the view of language as an immediate response
to natural objects. This language is ‘less under the influence of social vanity’
308
and is a
lot closer to the interjection: the immediate cry of emotion (passion) for which no
substitute can be found since even the most practiced poet cannot exactly replicate the
consciousness which consisted in a reaction to a situation from real life. This
interjectional aspect of language is, as even Coleridge realizes, a model in Wordsworth’s
argument for the felt truth of the passion. There is something motivated about it, natural
and naked. Ironically, for all his misguided critique of Wordsworth’s real language of
men, Coleridge manages to point to the heart of Wordsworth’s theory of poetic language
– built as the latter is on the interjectional principle – and finds a passage from ‘The
Thorn’ in order to illustrate that Mr Wordsworth does, after all, possess ‘genuine
imagination’. The passage ends with:
And to herself she cries,
Oh misery! Oh misery!
Oh woe is me! Oh misery!

In this cry of pain Coleridge finds genuine poetry which had not been interfered with by
‘a mere theory’.
309
But was not the theory itself all about spontaneous cries of sincere
feeling, natural expressions of emotion, motivated language with a ‘purpose’ – in one
word, the spoken? But perhaps Coleridge was not so much interested in disproving the

307
Ibid., p. 22.

308
Ibid., p. 14.

309
Jackson, H. J. ed., Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Oxford Authors), Oxford University Press, 1985, pp
346-7.

174
theory as in showing that it was not implemented in practice – i.e. few of Wordsworth’s
poems borrow directly from the language really spoken by men. Even in the passage
excerpted above, one doubts if Wordsworth meant more than just a vague imitation of the
cry of a mournful peasant.
But as Coleridge well knew, the resistant heterogeneity of the spoken meant that it was
not to be easily co-opted by the written.
310
Wordsworth’s own poetic practice shows that.
In any case, I do not wish to stress too much, as did Coleridge
311
, the literal end of the

310
One is reminded of a similar passage in Shakespeare’s King Lear where the King’s mournful cry is
registered as the word “Wail!” repeated several times. How is one to read such passages? It seems that the
best way to read them is to see them as an invitation to acoustic freedom which is the essence of graphic
representations of sound. Onomatopoeia, no matter how clever and precise it aspires to be, is after all an
impossible ideal. Thus, Shakespeare would not have us think that Lear actually said the word “Wail!” but
rather that he actually wailed – or produced some kind of mournful interjectional sound. If Lear’s “Wail!”
may be productively read as a stage direction, why should that acoustic awareness not extend to a
discussion of literary language more generally?

311
Coleridge simply takes the idea of a real or rustic language too literally. Thus, when Coleridge finds
characters in Wordsworth’s poems to which to object (see chapter xvii of his Biographia), he does not
realize that instead of looking for personages, he should have been looking for qualities. Wordsworth’s folk
was just a model – not an attempt at biography. In the same way, Coleridge’s objection to Wodrsworth’s
idea ‘that the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due
exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life, a language which actually constitutes the natural
conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 334) entirely
misses the target since Wordsworth’s intention was never to mechanically reproduce real-life speech.
Similarly, Coleridge’s reply to what he thought real language of men meant is not a reply at all: ‘To this I
reply; that a rustic’s language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to
be made consistent with the rules of grammar … will not differ from the language of any other man of
common sense…’ (p. 341) I doubt that Wordsworth was ever thinking of purifying provincialisms – let
alone of aiming at a standard English language which would then be asked to play the role of a
distinguishing linguistic characteristic of rustic characters. John Guillory follows Coleridge in his mistake
and assumes that what Wordsworth had in mind by the process of ‘selection’ was the subtraction of
provincialisms which, of course, made the product of this linguistic operation ‘nothing other than the
language of the educated middle-class’ (see Cultural Capital, pp 127-8). Actually, Wordsworth had indeed
mentioned a process of purification but that had related to the outspoken passion which was to be purged of
its grosser (‘disgusting’) elements (op. cit., p. 24); that is to say, the interjectional is not entirely left to
reign supreme but appears in a somewhat tamed form in Wordsworth’s argument. Poetic diction is, after all,
more than a savage cry. The spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling is recollected in tranquility, and yet
it is a tranquility which is not all that tranquil as the emotion gradually rises to a certain pitch which
disrupts the calmness of the contemplation. This second heightened state is both similar to and different
from the one which had produced the spontaneous cry of emotion (the interjection) – it is powerful yet
tamed.
175
theory. Suffice it to say, that the spoken functioned in the argument of the Preface as a
metaphor of literary language.
***
There is one other target of Coleridge’s critique which is just as important for an
understanding of Wordsworth’s subversion of the concept of literary language: the
statement that verse and prose differ only in the use of meter in the former. Coleridge
spends a lot of time explaining why poetry is not merely prose fitted to meter. But again,
in response to his concerned critique, it could be said that the prosaic is, like the spoken, a
quality. Poetry, the argument goes, is not an artificial adornment but a sincere expression.
Now, why would Wordsworth employ a generic distinction when he was meaning to talk
about a quality of poetry? The answer to this question lies in his essay on epitaphs. A
very similar distinction is made there between artificial poetry and prose. The latter is
selected as the best medium for the expression of genuine feeling. Given this interest in
the genuine, it is no wonder that the epitaph was the genre chosen: as Wordsworth
explicitly says, on the occasion of someone’s death we do not expect a triviality of
feeling but a sincere emotion. If prose is the best medium for the expression of sincere
sorrow (Wordsworth compares epitaphs and ends up stating that the most unnatural
epitaphs in the English language in existence were those composed by – not surprisingly
– the champion of poetic diction, Alexander Pope
312
), then any poetry which also
expresses sincere emotion is, in a sense, prosaic. As the whole section two of the essay on

312
‘Upon Epitaphs (2) and (3)’, in Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, pp 115, 123.

176
epitaphs shows, those inexperienced mourners who thought – misled by convention – that
standard poeticism was the most genuine expression of feeling (presumably because, to
the unenlightened, this was poetry) got entangled in a poetic diction whose hackneyed
phrasing ‘seduced’ the mind by trapping it into an inability to write with a faithfulness to
nature.
313
But Wordsworth somehow manages to rescue the ‘natural and pure’ ‘under
current’ of the mourner’s thoughts by translating the stilted language back into prose.
Good poetry, this argument seems to imply, has something prosaic about it – but that by
no means implies an equation of the two genres. Rather, what seems to be at stake is a re-
drawing of the map of literariness with genres no longer occupying designated rungs on
the hierarchy of valuation. Instead, we find ideals or qualities, with “prose” (i.e. the
sincere expression of genuine emotion) occupying the top spot.
The fluidity of generic denomination is entailed by the insistence on qualities. The
result is an imaginary hybrid formation (an ideal genre lying somewhere between poetry
and prose) which could, in turn, be recruited by Wordsworth in a revision of the literary
canon. It should be noted that prose never fails to appear precisely at those points where
the argument begins to look like a radical revaluation of what poetry (and by implication
poetic language) essentially is and also, crucially, at points where the argument starts to
look like a sweeping away of contemporary poetic fashions.
John Guillory is correct in claiming that Wordsworth chose a genre (prose) at a time
when the notion of what constituted literariness was just beginning to be established. The
nineteenth century, Guillory continues, was also a period when the novel as a genre was

313
Ibid., p. 115.

177
beginning to take shape. Wordsworth’s appeal to a fledgling genre seems to support the
thesis that he was not really talking about what we can now in hindsight identify as the
prose of his time (e.g. what the Preface designates as ‘frantic novels’
314
) but a quality
(exemplified by ‘good prose’) which could just as easily inhere in “good” poetry. ‘The
truth of this assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost all the
poetical writings, even of Milton himself.’
315
This assertion makes nonsense of Guillory
claim that Wordsworth’s recourse to the category of prose is a compromise between his
high standards for poetry which made him an enemy of poetic conventions of his time
and the cheap prose that was going around for which Wordsworth had nothing but
contempt.
316
Again, the argument was not intended to identify an actual genre – as
Guillory suggests – but to point to a quality which might enhance poetic language.
In his argument, heavily inflected by an avid Marxism out to prove that canon
formation is not based on an inherent linguistic distinction but is the product of social
pressures, Guillory co-opts the narrative of the Preface and presents it as a confusion in
generic distinctions ‘specifically at a crisis in the history of vernacular canon formation.’
His other supporting claim is ‘that the distinction between poetic diction and the lingua

314
Ibid., p. 17.

315
Ibid., p. 19.

316
‘Wordsworth’s embrace of prose as the language really spoken by men represents a compromise
between the distate for a clichéd poetic diction and his disdain for the taste of the public that neglects
canonical works in favor of ephemeral novels, plays, and novel-like narrative poems’ (Cultural Capital, p.
130) Far from equating the language really spoken by men with prose, the argument in the preface – as
well as in the essay on epitaphs – accords the same logical role for “prose” and the language of men, i. e.
these two categories function as pointers to crucial qualities (e.g. simplicity, directness, impassioned
sincerity, etc.).

178
communis is really determined by a generic distinction – between poetic genres and prose
genres.’ This is wide off the mark, but one of the premises of Guillory’s argument is still
crucial for an understanding of the implications of Wordsworth’s recruiting of the figure
of the folk in his Preface. This is the observation that ‘[f]or the first time poetic genres
and prose genres are compatible as literary genres.’
317
In other words, Wordsworth’s
discussion of prose and poetry (or rather his insistent crossing over from one genre to the
other) points precisely to the fact that Wordsworth was revising the very idea of
literariness in his discussion of poetic and prosaic (hence literary) language.
But this literary language (and by implication literariness) has nothing to do with the
standard vernacular, with Guillory’s lingua communis. The language Wordsworth
designated as poetic was heightened, purified, distilled. Wordsworth’s imaginatively
constructed hybrid category of prose-poetry (an impassioned language) borrowed
qualities from both genres but did not depend on an equation of the two genres.
318

Like Coleridge, Guillory is mistaken in his easy identification of a genre (prose) with an
ideal quality (the prosaic, loosely defined) inherent, according to Wordsworth’s theory, in
both good poetry and good prose.
319

Guillory’s sustained critique of the concept of literariness and of canon formation
depends for its effect on the thesis that “the canon” and “literariness” are categories

317
Cultural Captial, p. 129.

318
Hence, Guillory is entirely wrong in his claim that ‘the language of the novel and the language of poetry
are at this moment still virtually indistinct. It is this indistinction of language which Wordsworth
unwittingly confirms in defending the language of prose…’ (Cultural Capital, p. 131)

319
The terms ‘good poetry’ and ‘good prose’ are Wordsworth’s; they seem to have nothing to do with the
standard vernacular.

179
which are socially constructed in ‘the school’ which parcels out cultural and linguistic
capital. The process of parceling out reflects larger social processes, and to assume that
literariness is somehow a linguistically-motivated concept inherent in language itself is to
ignore these larger processes. Indeed, the argument goes, the history of canon formation
is collapsed into the history of literature by an ideology of tradition which perpetuates a
mistake committed even by the various critiques of the canon. The mistake is to assume
that the question of literary language is a question of an ‘essentially different kind of
language (literariness)’ instead of what it really is – a question of ‘linguistic
differentiation as a social fact.’
320

But while it should not be doubted that the canon is in many ways socially constructed,
it seems absurd to claim that ordinary language and literary language are essentially the
same thing and to think that authors which make up what is known as literature are so
many conduits of only social (and by no means linguistic) contingency. Guillory recruits
Bakhtin and Medvedev whose so-called critique of the formalist model of
defamiliarization is said to be designed to remedy the ‘polarization of linguistic practices
into the poetic or literary, and the ordinary or practical.’ Bakhtin, we are told, never really
meant to make a distinction between ordinary and literary in terms of essential linguistic
characteristics but only in terms of social factors such as the vertical (socially constructed)
hierarchy of varieties of speech. Sitting at the top, “literary language” is designed to
regulate the ‘spoken and written heteroglossia that swirls in from all sides’.
321
Guillory

320
Cultural Capital, pp 63-4.

321
‘Discourse in the Novel’, cited in Guillory, p. 66.
180
credits Bakhtin for placing the concept of literary language ‘in its proper category – not
aesthetics but sociolinguistics.’ In other words, the model of defamiliarization – which
sought to explain literariness by utilizing essentialist (i.e. linguistic) categories which
would explain why literary language is different from ordinary language – is replaced by
what Medvedev called ‘sociological poetics’.
322

It is easy to see from this extended version of the argument why Guillory would assume
that in Wordsworth the distinction between real language of men and poetic (or literary)
language is a symptom of a crisis in canon formation which is itself determined by larger
social factors. “Literary language” is not the ‘defamiliarized or the new’ but is
determined by ‘the operation of certain institutional forms.’
323
Without a doubt, Bakhtin
is right in pointing to varieties of language (codes which we switch all the time) and to
their social determination. It still is not clear however why literary language should be
‘virtually indistinguishable’ from real language.
324

322
The reference is Guillory’s, p. 66.

323
Ibid., p. 67.

324
Guillory is perhaps misled by the tenor of Bakhtin’s critique which does start out by saying that the
OPOIAZ circle were naïve in their mistaken identification of literary language. The mistake was in the
identification of literary language with real language, e.g. regional dialects, the Latin language, Old
Bulgarian as a literary privileged language in Russia, etc. And here – even at this early stage – we see how
wrong Guillory is in his co-opting Bakhtin into the thesis, which Guillory aims to prove, that literary
language ends up being, in Wordsworth, equated with real language. Isn’t this exactly what Bakhtin calls
naïve in the work of the formalists? Bakhtin makes an interesting analogy: he says that to talk of real-life
types of languages (e.g. dialects or the specialized language of the church or a foreign language) and to
equate those with literary language is the same thing as to try and define a painting by its chemical
elements. There is something more to a painting, apparently, than chemical elements. But does that
necessarily lead us to social construction (a factor whose importance in the formation and valuation of
literary language Bakhtin would surely not deny)? Bakhtin does talk about construction – but it is not a
social construction which he focuses on but a poetic construction. ‘Language acquires poetic characteristics
only in concrete poetic construction.’ (See Bakhtin Mikhail, Pavel N. Medvedev, P. N. Medvedev, The
181
The model of defamiliarization (which Guillory also criticizes for being a form of
psychologism) is and is not a polarization in that there would be no need for
defamiliarization if the literary had not become common, i.e. ordinary. Isn’t that
Wordsworth’s point in examining epitaphs where real language of mournful men
becomes entangled in artificial poeticisms? I stress this point because it seems to me that
the work of Synge and indeed of the Irish renaissance in general replicates Wordsworth’s
efforts at defamiliarizing the familiar. As became evident from the discussion of Synge’s
translations, what was being defamiliarized (in both Wordsworth and Synge) was the idea
of standard literariness. To adopt this model is not to deny that literariness is a
historically and socially contingent variable but to insist on the essential difference of two
traditions of speech – the spoken and the written – which Müller had also stressed. The
appropriation of dialectal (‘rustic’) speech was designed precisely to sound a new note, to
escape from the shackles of polite diction (Wordsworth), to follow a parallel linguistic
universe imagined as an exit from standardizing literariness (Synge, Müller), or to
subvert established ideas about what literature is as well as about what constitutes
canonicity (Synge, Wordsworth). What appears to be the conclusion from the foregoing
discussion is what Guillory cannot accept: that the literary is not the written nor the
spoken modeled on written standards. It is not the language formed at school and

Formal Method In Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction To Sociological Poetics, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978, p. 84) Bakhtin does complain that the formalists failed to ‘cleanse it [the literary
work] of the subjectivity and fortuitousness of individual perceptions’, that they ‘severed it from all those
spheres in which the work becomes historically real and objective.’ (Ibid., p. 158) This does not necessarily
mean, however, that literary language is only and above all a social construct. Indeed, Bakhtin preaches a
kind of return to the literary work while at the same time insisting on ‘a dialectical conception of the
“intrinsic” and the “extrinsic” of literary and extra-literary reality (ideological and otherwise) as an
obligatory condition for the formulation of a genuine Marxist literary theory.’ (Ibid., p. 155)

182
perpetuated by institutionally sponsored ideas about canonicity which mete out cultural
capital by labeling accepted (and therefore normalized) forms with the tag ‘Prestige’. Far
from arriving at a standard language (i.e. real speech shorn of provincialisms),
Wordsworth insisted on the deviant; indeed his whole argument about poetic language is
a celebration of the non-standard.
Even were it the case that the real language of men (when shorn of provincialisms, etc.)
is not essentially different from the standard, it would be incorrect to say that authors do
not have the right to imagine a form of speech radically and essentially different from the
familiar language of literature. No matter how “constructed” Synge’s poetic peasant
language might be, however unreal Lady Gregory’s Kiltartanese, the work of the Irish
renaissance seems to polarize two versions of literary language. The one accepts spoken
dialect, while the other eschews it. Ironically, Guillory would be right in claiming that the
spoken and the written are not that different in the work of Irish renaissance authors –
only this time, it is not the spoken purified from provincialisms
325
but rather the written
purified from commonness. Precisely at the moment of crisis of canon formation, authors
go to the spoken.
***
The remaining part of this section will examine the literary experimentation of William
Barnes as a model for the later acoustic work evident in Synge’s plays. Actually, Synge
eschewed Barnes’s approach in that he almost never used orthography to mark deviant

325
Guillory’s main error is to follow Coleridge in his assumption that Wordsworth claimed that poetic
language constituted the real language of men, only purified of provincialisms, etc. Wordsworth never
claimed that. It is not as if poetic language gets closer to the standard once it has undergone the process of
purification. Purification has nothing to do with provincialisms, dialectal detritus, etc. See note 311 above.
183
speech in his plays. (The only exception is the word ‘divil’ in the Tinker’s Wedding and
in The Playboy.) However, the spirit of Barnes’s work is by far not exhausted with overt
markings. There is a whole world of acoustics to which Barnes’s diacritics invite us, and
in that sense, his poetry can serve as a backdrop to Synge’s later serious experimentation
with the sound of language. Furthermore, the actors at Synge’s disposal already knew
how to pronounce the words and had no need of diacritics. This may be one reason why
Synge did not mark his plays. Another plausible explanation is the baggage of a whole
tradition of “stage Irish” which made use of transliteration for the purposes of a comical
(or otherwise stereotypical) representation of the Irish as non-standard speakers. The
absence of diacritical marks need not mean that we should forget about them. As Ann
Saddlemyer alerts, there is a significant acoustic dimension to Synge’s plays, which
would be lost if we do not add it to the printed word. But most importantly, Barnes is
significant in his alertness to the performativity of literary acoustics and to the violence
sound can exert on the standard language.
Barnes seems to have worked under the assumption that faithfulness to actual dialect
usage guarantees the transmissibility of the voice of the folk into the poem. Barnes’s
obstinate devotion
326
to the sounds of the folk and his quite professional interest in
philology make him a good candidate for a precursor to later (modernist) appropriations
of dialect in literary works. His is one way of coming at the problem of the appropriation
of the spoken by the written. Despite the fact that his strategy of relying heavily on

326
Thomas Hardy wrote about Barnes in 1908, ‘It may appear strange to some, as it did to friends, in his
lifetime, that a man of insight who had the spirit of poesy in him should have persisted year after year in
writing in a fast-perishing language…’(Preface to Select Poems of William Barnes, ed. Thomas Hardy, with
a preface by T. Hardy, Henry Frowde: London, 1908, p. viii)
184
spelling was not adopted by Synge and others, he pointed the way to the serious focus on
dialect as a cachet of sound.
Barnes’s poetry is an attempt at a close approximation to actual speech and a
triumphant celebration of the linguistic riches of the Dorset dialect. His answer to the
question about the possibility of representing the voice of the folk is a much more direct
approach: his phonetic transcription is the closest one can come to actual speech in the
absence of a recording device. Indeed, Barnes’s poetry is recognized as having scientific
value as a record of living speech. He rushed to fix in writing a dying way of speaking –
much like the folklorist whose task is again and again the preservation for posterity of
expiring culture. In this sense, Barnes’s dialect is vulnerable just as Synge’s stage
language is vulnerable.
At a superficial glance, his phonetic approach to dialectal speech might seem like an
extension, only in more developed form, of a long tradition of representing non-standard
speech in literary works. But if writers like Farquhar, Swift, or Carleton used spelling and
the occasional vocabulary item or syntactic structure to achieve, as the case may be,
humorous or realistic results, Barnes’s work consists in a total immersion in the vowels
and consonants as well as rhythms of the folk. If Wordsworth co-opted folk qualities in
order to distill them into his own voice, Barnes launched a wholesale attack on standard
written English. Twisted and turned into an unaccustomed shape, English orthography
becomes here an unmitigated eye-sore. In part, this accounts for the peculiar charm of the
poems which always do more than just represent.

185
A maïd wi' many gifts o' greǢ ce,
A maïd wi' ever-smilèn feǢ ce,
A child o' yours my childhood's pleǢ ce,
O leǢ nèn lawns ov Allen,
'S a-walkèn where your stream do flow,
A-blushèn where your flowers do blow,
A-smilèn where your zun do glow,
O leǢ nèn lawns ov Allen.
An' good, however good's a-waïgh'd,
'S the lovely maïd ov Elwell MeǢ d.
327

This opening stanza from ‘The Lovely Maïd ov Elwell MeǢ d’ juxtaposes two liquid
sounds (ï and Ǣ ) in a kind of sing-song (in the first two lines and later in the last line)
which is interrupted by the insistent accented è in the intervening lines. It is these key
vowels which serve as anchors in the otherwise unmarked vocalic limbo of the poem.
Trying to read this poem aloud is a strange experience – especially those parts which are
orthographically identical to the standard language. One hastens to the next anchor (the
next diacritically “safe” vowel), and, paradoxically, the undecidability of the
unmarkedness is part of the violence done to the standard. What is a reader to do between
“'S a-walkèn” and “A-blushèn”? The stream of dialectal vocality had just flown safely, if
strangely, within the regulated demarcations of the opening lines, but in those “free”
zones one is in the dark. Between the first and the last “O leǢ nèn lawns ov Allen”, the
syntax of the three rhythmically identical intervening lines becomes unstable precisely
where these lines, as they are written, seem to come closer to the standard. As the tension

327
Select Poems of William Barnes, ed. Thomas Hardy, with a preface by T. Hardy, Henry Frowde: London,
1908, p. 40.
186
(even in silent reading) gets activated and released by turns, the speaker/reader feels the
oscillation between standard and non-standard.
328

A later poem (‘A Witch’) performs this even more gymnastically than ‘The Lovely Maïd’.
She did, woone time, a dreadvul deǢ l o' harm
To Farmer Gruff’s vo'k, down at Lower Farm.
Vor there, woone day, they happened to offend her,
An' not a little to their sorrow,
Because they woulden gi'e or lend her
Zome 'hat she come to bag or borrow;
An' zoo, d'ye know, they soon begun to vind
That she'd a-left her evil wish behind.
329

Here, the tension is created not by diacritical marks but by the strange spellings (“woone”,
“vo'k”) as well as by the contractions. As with the previous poem, the syntax is also
affected by the shifting of tension from dialectal to normal (standard) – the whole
experience is not unlike an experiment in a hybrid delivery situated somewhere between
song and speech where each demands its own voice tension.
Although the use of strangely spelled sounds carried by syntax is one viable way out of
the dilemma of representation, the approach has a major fault: it assumes that a phonetic
representation in writing (however faithful to the spoken mode) of living speech is all that

328
The poem ‘Pentridge by the River’ is almost identical in this respect. Are we to suppose that the two
rhyming lines in the middle should be left “untouched” by the dialectal abandon surrounding them?

Pentridge !—oh ! my heart 's a-zvvellèn
Vull o' jaÿ wi' vo'k a-tellèn
Any news o' thik wold pleǢ ce,
An' the boughy hedges round it,
An' the river that do bound it
Wi' his dark but glis'nèn feǢ ce.
Vor there's noo land, on either hand.
To me lik' Pentridge by the river.
(Ibid., p. 70)

329
Ibid., p. 177.
187
is required to make the material sound. True, the poet can recite at a folk gathering
330
in
the same way that the playwright can help train (as did Synge) the actors towards the
exact desired effect. Still, Barnes banked too much on his assumption that his material
would somehow sound itself of its own accord if only the transliteration was exhaustive
enough. Taking the author of the Lyrical Ballads at his word, Barnes expelled himself
into a position which is really at the opposite extreme from Wordsworth’s distanced
distillation of qualities.
Whatever the theoretical underpinnings of Barnes’s poetico-philological project, the
poems unfold a new universe of sound. The listener can only respond with humble
recognition of this parallel universe. This too is a possible language in a possible world.
Regardless of whether the Dorset dialect is purer or smoother or mellower than Standard
English
331
, the haunting presence of the Dorset sounds bedevils the reader accustomed to
zdandard εngerlesh. Dialectal speech strikes the big ‘S’ of both $ubject and $tandard.
Two strikes which spell disorientation and doom. One is lucky not to get off the road in

330
Thomas Hardy points to the unscriptible vocality of Barnes’s poems, ‘The effect indeed of his
recitations upon an audience well acquainted with the nuances of dialect – impossible to impart to outsiders
by any kind of translation – can hardly be imagined by readers of his line acquainted only with English in
its customary form.’ (Cited in Shepherd, Valerie, Language Variety and the Art of the Everyday, Pinter
Publishers: London and New York, 1990, p. 75) Folk gatherings of this sort are the ground where the
artistic register of folk speech is forged, where common speech, in its distilled version, rises to the heights
of poetry. In its immediacy, the prinkum (in Connaught) – that is to say the soirée, hoolie, vecherinka or
velada – is the ancestor of more recent poetry-reading get-togethers. I owe the word ‘Prinkum’ to Padraic
O’Farrell’s narrative-cum-dictionary collection of folk sayings from various parts of Ireland (cf. O’Farrell,
Padraic, How the Irish Speak English, Mercier Press; Revised Edition, 1994, p. 81).

331
In the ‘Dissertation’ accompanying the poems, Barnes painstakingly explains the vowels, diphthongs,
and consonants; draws similarities between Dorset’s ways (e.g. opening certain vowels, closing others,
softening or making less fricative certain consonants, etc.) of articulating sounds and the ways of several
major European languages; asserts the more purely Saxon nature of the dialect vis-à-vis standard English;
points to ‘advantages’ which the dialect has ‘over the national speech’ and advances the case that dialect is
a purer expression of the national ethos.

188
this darkened locale of language. Subjugated by the clamorous sonority of the same-but-
different, the unaccustomed eye yields to the ear. One is in the world of a first-grade
spelling primer – or, perhaps more comfortably, in a recording studio: ‘Voice solo…Take
Five…’ Wherever we are, we are not on target – just aiming to acquire it.
No glossary or typed description can substitute for the real experience of the folk. As
Barnes himself was aware, perhaps feeling a certain unease about his own project,
something changes in the transition from ‘the plow towards the desk’.
332
The necessary
failings of his project ironically allow Barnes to “translate” a feeling of being lost in a
language, of being just about on the point of grasping, yet not quite. Unable to fully
represent the actual speech of the Dorset peasants, the poems leave us on the way to
language. This time, the target language is the folk’s way of sounding. Between the
standard and the dialect, one is stranded in a space of inter-language, forever. Ultimately,
this applies to Synge’s hybrid language as well. The feeling of dialect as a strong bastion
of cultural difference is palpable in plays like The Tinker’s Wedding or The Well of Saints.
As increasing communication between inhabitants of different parts of England,
and the spread of school education among the lower ranks of the people, tend to
substitute book English for the provincial dialects, it is likely that after a few
years many of them will linger only in the more secluded parts of the land, if
they live at all…
333

This Dorset language will ‘after a few years’ be the property of the philologist and the
antiquary. Barnes’s attempt to monumentalize the sounds of the westernmost parts of

332
Barnes, William, Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect: With a Dissertation and Glossary, John
Russell Smith: London, 1844, p. 36.

333
Ibid., p. 1.

189
England amounts to a self-banishment into and from the lost language.
334
Following an
ever-departing trajectory, his own lifelong search for a lost language ever-receding into
distant memory stands for all serious but impossible translations of the non-standard by
the standard. The alphabetic symbols and the diacritical marks cannot bear the burden of
this lost vocality. With these poems, as with much of the drama of Synge, we are in an
inter-linguistic space where we forever strive to attain.
Synge’s creative approach seems to combine the two diametrically opposite strategies
of Barnes and Wordsworth. On the one hand, there is a serious attempt to hear the exact
sounds of folk speech and on the other hand, there is the distillation of qualities. If
diacritical marking cannot possibly translate these qualities, then they should perhaps be
distilled and not given in literal form. What is more, distillation allows Synge not simply
to imitate the sound of folk speech but to produce a literary language (indeed a
literariness) which would be inflected by folk speech in that it will have the same
simplicity, directness, verve, etc. The category ‘brutal’ (as in Synge’s plea that literature
should become brutal) seems to be precisely such a blend between distilled quality and
actual acoustic fact.
***
Did Synge truly write in a real Anglo-Irish dialect? Can the voice of the subaltern folk
ring in its true essence in the individual voice of the privileged author? If the stage is like
a public address system, isn’t the speaking voice necessarily distorted? Can a single voice

334
‘Barnes’s localness, though it is not so parochial and innocent as to be ignorant of the outside world,
does not fully manifest its strength in the growth that stems from adaptability in a changing world: it does
not attempt to go forward’ (Shepherd,Valerie, Language Variety and the Art of the Everyday, p. 104)
190
imitate the powerful chant of a crowd? Behind such often voiced questions lies the
assumption that what folk-based literature amounts to is a fixed, grounded monument, a
more or less faithful copy which must be compared to the original. The author’s voice
may or may not be the “real” voice of the folk but it certainly borrows qualities from the
latter and it is to these that we must give voice if we are to be able at all to read the
dramatic output of Irish renaissance authors like J. M. Synge. What that entails is special
attention paid to the subversive implications of the use of dialect for literary purposes as
well to the acoustic qualities of what has come down to us as a written text.
Dialect, or more generally a tradition of folk speech which runs parallel to the
mainstream literary tradition, is a carrier of spark-like content (Herder); it constitutes a
potential source of energy whereby the author may renew his or her own language. This
is because dialect too is highly distilled, momentary in its appearance, and object-like in
its use. It is inherently less theoretical and more expressive. It is more poetic and closer to
that primordial unity of language and music. It is in some ways interjectional and
therefore expressive of the wonder of the freshly encountered object. It is more sound-
based, hence more capable of sounding objects; more direct, more immediate, present,
and vigorous. A simple comparison between the conventional, standardized, received
code and the idiomatic language which the folk fashioned for itself makes these
assertions obvious.
335
The emphasis on folk performance as a way of participating in the
experience of reading literary works written in dialect allows all these qualities to come
to the fore. In the end, since these qualities are ephemeral (as there is no tradition left

335
Etymologically, an early meaning of idiom is ‘one’s own’ language.
191
which specifies how to sound plays like those written by Synge), we are left with the only
option of a reading which borrows its strategies from folk performance.
Part of the loss of this original flavor of dialectal language should be attributed to our
inability to fabricate a return to the lost originary moment of aural invention. Even with
Synge’s guidance, the Abbey actors found difficulties in saying their lines; what hope is
left for us 21-century readers when no tradition of reading Irish modernist plays has been
kept alive? Thus, Synge’s language is ultimately not accessible to us. But there is a virtue
in this: even though an essential part of its making was its preparation to be read by
standard speakers, that very fact forces the able reader of dialect poetry to want to hear
the qualities of folk speech. In an important sense, then, the reading experience replicates
the experience of the philologist lost in an oral inter-linguistic space of the folk. This
feeling of lost-ness produces a special desire to sound the material correctly. In other
words, the reading process becomes a performance in a more radical way than would be
true of the consumption of drama in general. While reading a play by Synge, we look for
the dialectal – and not for the standard. Our inter-linguistic experience becomes a
deliberate collusion in the subversion of the notion of literariness.
The functioning of local speech as folklore is crucial in this regard in that it opens the
door to folk-style performance. To explain this, an analogy from music would be helpful.
Unlike classical music, with its fixed notes and traditions of execution (e.g. fingerings,
bows, etc.), folk music (and language) is unfixed. It is always in the process of becoming.
In a trivial sense, we can say the same thing about the Moonlight Sonata, for instance –
i.e. it sounds different every time. Sure, but in folk music, the notes do not even exist
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except somewhere in the ideal realm of the folk tradition. The material and the process of
its sounding in performance are one and the same thing. Instead of works of art, we have
artistic modes in which the performer fashions his or her own momentary product.
Similarly, folk-based literature can be read by sounding it according to certain
specifications. The result is always an intersection between practice and theory. The
reading is always an experiment. Thus Synge’s plays invite us not only to sound them
according to a certain set of specifications (that would be true of any poem or play) but
also to perform them in unaccustomed ways which do not follow finalized theatrical
instructions so much as modes of linguistic being. Thus when reading Synge’s Tinker’s
Wedding (or, for that matter, Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News), we share with the
authors a trail-blazing attitude to language, i.e. these authors were responsible for doing
something momentary and first-time. The ‘momentary gods’ (Cassirer) of this spark-
bound literary experimentation should be distinguished from previous uses of dialect in
literature, even from serious practitioners such as Barnes where the point is precisely the
fixture of the gods in perpetuity and not their momentary and wonder-evoking qualities.
The following is a list of acoustic strategies which stress the ephemeral nature of
literary language which is hybridized by dialect. By stressing the unfixed acoustics of the
Irish plays, these strategies could help make the reading process approximate the
essential difference which distinguishes dialect-inflected literary language from what we
may call – after Bakhtin and Guillory – a “general literariness”.
1. When reading these plays, one imagines a voice which is not a feverishly histrionic or
stylized accent (e.g. some productions of Synge) but a voice with a real sense of double
193
orientation: i.e. alternating between standard and accented voice and thus paying tribute
to the hybridity of the language. (In a play such as Deirdre of the Sorrows this would be
especially apposite.) Instead of one uniform, invariant, fixed, character-bound voice, we
get a real sense of being lost in an inter-linguistic space (the encounter between Constable
and vendor in the beginning of Spreading the News is a good start to practice this type of
oscillation between standard and non-standard English).
2. Tempo is of the utmost importance. The reading voice speeds up or down to create
different rhythmical groupings (it is a good idea to start with the fixed step of a folk
dance which follows a formulaic pattern/beat), then free-wheels.
336

3. Onomatopeoic reading is expressly invited by Synge in that many of the conversations
either imitate a natural sound or are framed by an accompanying sound. The reading
voice can find an object or sound in nature to imitate (e.g. read with a creak, or a rasp, or
a warble, etc.).
4. Since alternative orthography is either not used or used only sparingly in these works,
they allow ample room for variation where the reader’s discretion may take priority. The
Hibernicism coefficient is relevant here as well. Vocalic and consonantal gradations can
be practiced in advance (e.g. between the ‘e’ and the ‘i’ there are at least 4 or 5
intermediary e/i sounds). Similarly, there are varieties of plosiveness for ‘p’, different –
dental or palatal – contacts for ‘t’, etc.

336
Lady Gregory explains how her first play was conceived in a kind of groove: ‘I did not aspire to a stage
production, but I thought a little play in rhyme might perhaps be learned and acted by Kiltatanese school-
children; and it was on the railway journey home, through Italy and the Alps and Calais, that to the rhythm
of the engine I began putting into rhyme the legend of St Colman’s birth, as I had heard it from the old
people, my neighbours. Monsignor Fahy, then our parish priest, was pleased with it and approved.’
(Coxhead, Elizabeth, Lady Gregory. A Literary Portrait, London: Macmillan, 1961, p. 69)
194
5. The non-standard grammar in the Irish works (e.g. Kiltartanese infinitive) should not
be considered absolutely fixed in its usage: e.g. more or less of it can be used for the
same speeches. These different levels of concentration of dialect grammar may be
coordinated with the strategies used in prompt 1. Neither Kiltartanese nor Synge-speak is
a fixed set of rules but a mode which is open to various interpretations.
6. Dialectal features such as rise-fall intonation, specific cadences, etc., will forever
remain targets of speculation since they are irretrievably lost. Hence, borrowings from
other dialects are allowed. What is important is not a localized variety of speech but a
general sense of non-standard language which is also in sync with the dramatic situation.
7. Sensitivity to the movement/pulse/drive/pace of the literary work can be a fertile
ground for improvisation.
337

These suggestions will allow the sense of linguistic discovery to be recreated by
reconstructing, however imperfectly, the dynamism which is at work in Synge’s texts.
One can feel the language trying to negotiate its degree of fixedness, of deviation from
the standard. In order to re-stage this originary moment of language-formation in
accordance with the exploratory spirit of the modernist experiments in dialect, we have
only one option – to do the same as they did. And they did what the folk before them had

337
Willie Fay, one of the Abbey’s leading men who played a central role in decisions about the acting,
wrote in his autobiography, ‘We got a tremendous pace into it, the pace of a hard football match.’ (Cited in
Coxhead, p. 80) Rhythmic and other constraints distinguish folk music from classical. In a way, the pre-
ordained pattern dictated by the tradition of performance is fixed, and this can seem limiting. Within that
formula, however, there is a lot of potential for variation and innovation. Maestro Paco de Lucia describes
the interplay of tradition and individual performance as a process of hanging on to a tree with one hand, the
other enjoying its freedom to roam around; the feeling of liberty within the limits of the tradition is
vertiginous. Whether or not the dialect was, as George Moore would have it, a mere ‘Kiltartan three-holed
whistle’, it was what you did with it that mattered. One need not posit a dichotomy between limitation and
liberty.

195
done. They deviated. We can see, then, that what drives these works is the strong impetus
to perform. Unlike recent hybrids, which bask in the glory of their own unintelligibility,
these not-so-abnormal-looking experiments with non-standard idiom invite completion in
ways surprisingly radical and palatable.
Dialect as Folklore
Like much of folklore, the weirding of English by the Irish happened by a combination
of pleasure and necessity. Language-making, in its communal variety, is, like folklore, a
distillation of the timeworn efforts of the folk. Language is itself a tradition which has its
own dynamism. This dynamic/traditional aspect permeates dialectal speech in the form of
idiomatic richness, melody, distilled sententious wisdom, etc. Unlike the standard, dialect
follows its own isolated course. This does not mean that it is isolated from or oblivious to
wider cultural developments. It is simply more autochthonous and more willful in the
way it steers its course. It folds back on itself, feeds off of its own energy like a serpent
biting its tail. It is transmitted orally while its grammar is an imaginary target which the
folk cannot choose to mis-hit the way a speaker of the standard can choose to escape
from the received code into dialect. Thus, in whatever ways dialect realizes its variation
from the standard, it does so of necessity. The folk cannot help mincing the standard
language. This natural necessity is an easy target for parody.
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What is funny about a
Frenchman or an Irish peasant speaking English is their mulish predisposition to hack at
the phonological and grammatical meat of the received standard. They begin to look like
another species, ludicrous and incompetent. Their speech is who they are. Similarly, folk

338
And it can easily be mistaken for a limitation.
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culture is stereotypically perceived as a natural and rooted phenomenon. Even in the most
benign formulations, the folk is thought of as stuck in its modes of cultural expression,
however great the result of this innate obstinacy may be.
What is often ignored in naturalizing representations of folklore as an eternal present
expressive of the folk’s essence is the element of play. It is of course extremely difficult
to posit an origin of folk speech, but one can imagine a possible development starting
from the invention of an individual word or phrase which is then taken up locally and is
accepted as part of the linguistic tradition. In some instances, it may even go on to
become part of the standard; initially, it may be admitted to the informal or slang register,
and in later stages it may even lose its dialectal flavor.
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This neologistic mechanism of
transmission from idiolect to dialect to standard is only one way in which we can avoid
the “natural necessity” fallacy concerning folk speech. Another way is to remember that
folk speech, like folklore in general, is performative/onomatopoeic
340
/hybrid in a strong
sense and is, hence, always in the process of becoming. It aims at, and in its turn it serves
as, a moving target. Its improvisatory grammar-bending is almost inherently a theatrical
gesture; its alternative movements (both at the syntactic and melodic levels) suggest a
living current. Dialect is breath: physical and characteristic of its carrier.
The distillation of a whole linguistic tradition stands behind the abnormal sounds of
regional speech. It if was a species, dialect would be an ant, carrying seven times its own

339
Generally speaking, dialectal flavors do not die very easily. The same could be said of the characteristic
flavor of folklore – e.g. the adage, the proverb, etc., still retain much of their original folksy feel.

340
To the extent that folklore loves to imitate sounds, it is like a primitive language. This is evident in the
self-reflexive folkloric trope of the singing voice in many folk songs.
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weight. Like an ancient folk style, dialectal speech is charged with content – even if it
carries its charge lightly and briskly. Let the ethnographer hurry in its footsteps before it
is gone. Like a momentary cry, an interjection, dialect is on the outskirts of language in
the same way that folklore is peripheral to mainstream culture. In the next chapter, I will
examine an attempt to reintroduce an ancient tradition back into mainsteam culture.

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Chapter Two: Poetic Folklorism. Yeats’s Act

The craft of verse
Speaking to the psaltery
The method
Quarrelsome domain: Yeats among modern musicians
Modernist Balladry

I do not write for these people who attack
everything that I value, not for those others who
are lukewarm friends, I am writing for a man I
have not seen. I built up in my mind the picture
of a man who lived in the country where I had
lived, who fished in mountain streams where I
had fished; I said to myself, ‘I do not know
whether he is born yet, but born or unborn it is
for him I write.’ I made this poem about him; it
is called ‘The Fisherman’.
(Complete Works, Vol. X, 252)

As late as the 1930s, Yeats was still talking about folklore and how it served as a model
for poetic and dramatic performance. In a BBC programme titled ‘Poems and Women’,
he went back in time to those early years of folklore-collecting, emphasizing the fact that,
in a sense, his poetry was not entirely his own but was a result of what Synge called
‘collaboration’ with the Irish peasant:
When I made my search for simplicity, I went from cottage to cottage in Ireland
getting people to tell stories or sing them, and I tried to write like those stories.
Perhaps you will think the little verses I am now going to read you rather empty,
but they still seem to me good in their unpretending way. In each case it was
somebody else’s thought that I took up and elaborated.
341

341
‘Poems about Women’ (Broadcast, BBC National Programme on April 10, 1932) in Yeats, W. B., Later
Articles and Reviews. Uncollected Articles, Reviews and RadioBroadcasts Written after 1900 (vol. x of
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, general editors Richard Finneran and George Mills Harper), ed. by
Colton Johnson, Scribner: New York, 2000, p. 235. In a broadcast from London on Saturday, July 3, 1937
titled ‘My Own Poetry’, Yeats read ‘The Curse of Cromwell’. Humbly, he announced that ‘[t]he best line
199

For the BBC recordings, Yeats also liked to preface each of the poems he read with a
little story explaining the poem’s provenance, and in every case he stressed the “natural”
transmission of culture from people to poet. Before reading ‘To an Isle in the Water’,
Yeats explains:
I asked a man who pretended to know Irish to tell me the meaning of the words
‘Shule, shule, shularoon’ – they are the burden of a well-known Irish ballad. He
said they meant ‘Shy as a rabbit, helpful and shy’. They meant nothing of the
kind, he was a liar, but he gave me the theme of a poem which I call ‘To an Isle
in the Water.
342

Whether he lays the forgery at the folk’s door or at his own, Yeats insists that his poems
came about from an everyday event the same way as in folklore a song originates with a
specific event in real life. The Irish literary movement as a whole is portrayed as
producing culture for an acoustically proficient folk which is the recipient of the literati’s
efforts. ‘We thought that our people were not a reading people, outside the towns, but a
listening people. Everybody could sing to some tune or other, and everybody listened to
interminable speeches.’
343

in my poem – I leave you to find it out – is not mine. It was translated from a Gaelic poem, where it was
used as I have used it.’ The phrase in question is ‘beaten into clay’ and comes from an anonymous Gaelic
lament ‘The earls, the lady, the people Beaten into the clay, c. 1700 (see ibid., p. 284 and note 408).
342
Ibid., p. 235. The method of transmission of poetry was crucial for Yeats. In the following statement
about the Indian poet Tagore, Yeats places the poet in a natural medieval folkloric chain of transmission.
‘As far as literature is concerned he [Tagore] is still living in the fourteenth century, for the conditions for
creating and holding an audience are very much like those that existed in Chaucer’s time.’ Yeats explains
that once Tagore writes his verse and the music for it, his poetry is ‘spoken and sung by everybody’. He has
minstrels who visit him and to whom he teaches his material, and they go and spread it in an ever widening
periphery (Akporji, Chii, Figures in a Dance. The Theater of Yeats and Soyinka, Africa World Press, Inc.:
Trenton, NJ, 2003, p. 303). Interestingly enough, Yeats thought of calling his psaltery disciples ‘minstrels.’

343
‘The Irish Literary Movement’, a dialog broadcast on October 12, 1935, in ibid., p. 254.

200
These ‘listening people’ preserved the spirit of ancient poetry and music just as they
had preserved the ‘ancient religion of the world.’
344
The goal of the modern poet was to
rediscover this ancient spirit, and the most natural place to go was among the ‘common
people, wherever civilization has not driven its plough too deep’.
345
In A Vision, Yeats
went as far as imagining a larger cultural movement based on folklore which would span
the whole of Europe:
Ever since I began to write I have awaited with impatience a linking, all Europe
over, of the hereditary knowledge of the country-side, now becoming known to
us through the work of wanderers and men of learning, with our old lyricism so
full of ancient frenzies and hereditary wisdom, a yoking of antiquities, a
Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
346

There is an almost Proppian moment in this view in that there seems to be an underlying
unity of belief (a deep unity of structure) which is larger than the local and yet, to
discover it, one has to study the local very closely. It is possible, according to this view,
to descend into the depths of this One-structure where even one’s own mingles with the
structure.
The unity of culture was still to be found in the leftovers from the ancient Irish tradition
which were accessible via a recorse to the still living folkloric tradition. The old heroic

344
See Marcus, Phillip, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance, second edition, Syracuse
University Press: 1987, p. 25.

345
Ibid., p. 25.

346
Cited in Pierce, David, Yeats’s Worlds. Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination, Yale University
Press, 1995. In a lecture delived at the University of Wisconsin, Yeats expressed a similar view, but this
time the one-structure was to be found in the Irish literary tradition: ‘universities must study the literature
of Ireland if they wish to fully understand the roots of literature of Europe.’ (see Strand, Karin, Yeats’s
American Lecture Tours, PhD thesis, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 1978, p. 39. Like a
dialect keeping linguistic qualities alive, folklore still retained the roots of ancient (European, even global)
culture.

201
legends were, for Yeats, ‘the oldest vernacular literature of Europe’, and the spirit of this
literature still existed among the peasantry in Ireland and the Scottish highlands.
347
Thus,
going back in time was no mere anthropology. Indeed anthropology (pace Gregory Castle)
was never the main emphasis in Yeats’s fieldwork or theoretical statements. Unearthing
cultural left-overs served a more specific purpose. In ‘Modern Poetry: A Broadcast’
(1936), Yeas describes the mechanism of coming back to traditional material as a way of
looking forward. In this game of leapfrog,
We [‘The Rhymers’ Club’] did not look forward or look outward, we left that to
the prose writers; we looked back. We thought it was in the very nature of poetry
to look back… We thought that style should be proud of its ancestry, of its
traditional high breeding, that an ostentatious originality was out of place
whether in the arts or in good manners.
348

Folklore, with its living tradition, constitutes a framework for modernizing processes in
both literature and culture at large. It is as if the writer jumps on a bandwagon that never
stops moving. The folk tradition runs with its own speed, and to jump onto its beat is no
small feat since the procedure requires rigorous training and a deep commitment.
‘Because Ireland has still a living tradition, her poets cannot get it out of their heads that
they themselves, good-tempered or bad-tempered, tall or short, will be remembered by
the common people’.
349
Folklore is a vehicle larger than the literary tradition. It moves
the whole of literature forward and to ignore it is the same thing as to ignore the

347
Yeats’s American Lecture Tours, p. 73. Similarly, in a San Francisco lecture, Yeats stated: ‘It has also
been said that if you wish to know what Greece was before Athens became the culture center of the world,
you must observe the Irish peasantry of today. These simple peasants have vision. The great poems of the
ancients were due to visions, to dreams.’ (Ibid., p. 78)

348
Op. cit., p. 92.

349
Ibid., p. 100.

202
movement of the earth under our feet which we do not feel moving from our limited point
of view. In a section titled ‘The Predominant Peasant’ from ‘The Story of Irish Players’,
an article in Chicago’s Sunday Record-Herald, February 4, 1912, Yeats says: ‘With us
the Irish peasant is predominant for the moment, as was the peasant in the Norwegian
movement.’
350

The value of folk knowledge lay mostly in the perception that folklore was spontaneous,
immediate, sensuous, direct, and concrete. Folklore had hoarded fragments of ancient
philosophy as it was part of a universal memory, a ‘common antiquity’
351
. An
indifference to cold abstraction was the highest virtue of the folkloric vision. But Yeast
was not simply a good listener. What he took from his experience with the Irish folk was
a persistent image of the folkloric enactment as an ideal setting for poetry. His theories of
performance are primarily indebted to this image. It was as if the poem were to be spoken
from a public platform with the Irish folk as audience. Yeats imagined an audience of
several thousand with him as the central speaker, as in a feis.
352
To get across to this type
of audience, one needed a voice which was an elaboration of the rhythms of common

350
W. B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose 2, Reviews, Articles and Other Miscellaneous Prose 1897 – 1939,
Collected and edited by John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, Columbia University Press: New York, p. 402.

351
‘Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places’ in op. cit., p. 55.

352
In Explorations,Yeats describes his model folk performer: ‘Many costumes and persons come into my
imagination. I imagine an old countryman upon the stage of the theatre or in some little country courthouse
where a Gaelic society is meeting, and I can hear him say that he is Raftery or a brother, and he has
tramped through France and Spain and the whole world.’ (Cited in Schuchard, Schuchard, Ronald, ‘The
Minstrel in the Theatre: Arnold, Chaucer, and Yeats’s New Spiritual Democracy’, in Yeats Annual No. 2,
ed. Richard J. Finneran, Macmillan Press: London, 1983, pp 17-8) Actually here, Yeats imagines a Raftery
impersonator – and his act becomes the enactment of an enactment.

203
speech spoken with profound feeling. More specifically, Yeats and Florence Farr’s
method of speaking to musical notes was designed to capture large audiences:
I have heard Miss Florence Farr recite to a great audience – an audience of eight
or nine hundred people – and make every word heard to the end of the house,
every phrase and rhythm, very single word of the poem heard to the farthest
corner, and all perfectly expressible.
353

A typical early Yeatsean claim sees folklore as the bedrock of all good literature:
Folk-lore is at once the Bible, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Book of
Common Prayer, and well-nigh all the great poets have lived by its light. Homer,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and even Dante, Goethe, and Keats, were
little more than folk-lorists with musical tongues.’
354

Towards the end of his life, Yeats re-discovered the reason for his use of folklore by
imagining a folkloric enactment as the bedrock of his poetry as well as an ideal model of
performance:
I wanted all my poetry to be spoken on a stage or sung, and, because I did not
understand my own instincts, gave half a dozen wrong or secondary reasons; but
a month ago I understood my reasons. I have spent all my life in clearing out of
poetry every phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for
the ear alone…. ‘Write for the ear’, I thought, so that you may be instantly
understood as when an actor or a folk singer stands before an audience.’
355

353
Yeats, W. B., Four Lectures by W. B. Yeats, p. 88. Elsewhere, Yeats imagines a large folk event: ‘If we
are to delight our three or four thousand young men and women with a delight that will follow them into
their houses, and if we are to add the countryman to their number, we shall need more than the play, we
shall need those other spoken arts. The player rose into importance in the town, but the minstrel is of the
country.’ (See Schuchard, Ronald, ‘The Minstrel in the Theatre, p. 15)

354
‘The Message of the Folk-Lorist’ (1893), in Unpublished Prose I, p. 284. It is significant that Yeats does
not see the need to distinguish folklore from myth, as does Mary Thuente (W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore,
pp 2-3). Folklore is that which the peasants tell, sing, recite, speak, act, hand down from generation to
generation, etc. If one adopts Thuente’s distinction, one is then forced to say that the ‘subject matter of
ancient Irish myth still survived in nineteenth-century Irish oral tradition but generally in a very fragmented
and debased form.’ But as a comparativist, Yeats ‘was comparing one form of belief with another, and like
Paracelsus, who claimed to have collected his knowledge from midwife and hangman, I was discovering a
philosophy.’ (‘The Message of the Folk-Lorist’)

355
‘An Introduction for my plays’ (1937), in Yeats, W. B., Essays and Introductions, Macmillan: New
York, 1961, p. 529.

204

In ‘A General Introduction for My Work’, the mechanism of going back is once again
affirmed as a ‘modern’ way of writing: ‘we Irish poets, modern men also, reject every
folk art that does not go back to Olympus. Give me time and a little youth and I will
prove that even “Johnny, I hardly knew ye” goes back.’
356
But there is something more to
this aesthetics of the leapfrog. Going back to old sources not only allowed the modern
poet to seize a number of crucial qualities possessed by folklore but also opened the door
to a pre-literary dispensation – before the notion of the literary even existed. In a sense,
this was a way of going back to the very origin of poetry, untainted by modern standards
of literariness. So, the impetus to ‘get a style’ ‘plucked [Yeats] out of the Dublin art
schools … and sent [him] down into Connacht to sit by turf fires.’ Yeats goes on:
I felt indignant with Matthew Arnold because he complained that somebody,
who had translated Homer into a ballad measure, had tried to write epic to the
tune of ‘Yankee Doodle.’ It seemed to me that it did not matter what tune one
wrote to, so long as that gusty energy came often enough and strongly
enough.
357

Yeats’s litmus test is the street. One should ‘go down into the street’ and discover how
much of the written tradition really depends on established connections which were first
forged within the unwritten tradition. In other words, Yeats’s vernacular vision of poetry
includes a reframing of the literary tradition within the oral/vernacular tradition. The oral
tradition is the hidden origin behind all good poetry, whether we realize this or not. In

356
Essays and Introductions, p. 516.

357
‘What is “Popular Poetry”?’ in Essays and Introductions, p. 5.
205
that sense, ‘the poetry of the coteries … does not differ in kind from the true poetry of the
people’.
358

Yeats’s vision of an erstwhile ‘unity of culture’ which aligns the folk with the best
qualities of aristocratic literature led him to think of performed poetry as craft and magic,
and of performed words as carrying a ‘far-off’ suggestive quality:
I learned soon to cast away another illusion about ‘popular poetry.’ I learned
from the people themselves, before I learned it from any book, that they cannot
separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea of a cult with ancient
technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly separate mere learning from
witchcraft, and are fond of words and verses that keep half their secret to
themselves. Indeed, it is certain that before the counting-house had created a
new class and a new art without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art
and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the
cloister, the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the coteries
as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical animation, in idiom,
in images, in words full of far-off suggestion, with the unchanging speech of the
poets.
359

The folk possess an internal aesthetic filter as their ‘mother-wit’, accreted from age-long
acquaintance with the unwritten tradition, guides them to recognize good verses from bad.
This is an intuitive understanding of the literary before the literary ever existed, an
internal aesthetic sense which was accessible to the poet working close to the turf.
***
Yeats often thought of the folkloric enactment as one bringing him back to the origins
of things; before aesthetics intervened to pass its informed judgment, there were forms
which carried moods. Through this vehicle, one could go back a long way to a locus
where the performance of the art coincided with the art itself – an enchanting space

358
‘What is “popular poetry”?’ in op. cit., p. 8.

359
Ibid., pp 10-11.
206
where the word achieved magical status. In essays, correspondence, lectures, broadcasts,
talks, interviews, poems and plays, Yeats offers many descriptions of the folkloric act as
a kind of model on which to build modern performance. As soon as one steps off the
main road, a whole new world opens up where this ancient type of act, with all its magic,
was still available to the beholder. Here is how Yeats describes his attendance of an
impromptue folk performance in Ireland. The ‘wide space’ is just another acoustic
clearing which Yeats would try to reproduce in his own poetic act.
Last night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan road to listen to some Irish
songs … The voices melted into the twilight, and were mixed into the trees, and
when I thought of the words they too melted away, and were mixed with the
generations of men. Now it was a phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an
emotional form that had carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten
mythologies. I was carried so far that it was as thought I came to one of the four
rivers, and followed it under the wall of paradise to the roots of the trees of
knowledge and life.
360

It is clear from this passage that Yeats’s model of performance could be imaginatively
constructed and did not necessarily borrow from one single source in Irish culture. Indeed,
as some of Yeats’s statements cited above indicate, his performative folk was a mixture
of characters, some going back a long way in time. Yeats’s folk is the ancient folk is the
Homeric folk is the adamic, the medieval, the Gaelic, the Keltic, the Arran folk et cetera.
In Yeats’s own words, ‘the earliest poet in India and the Irish peasant in his hovel nod to
each other across the ages.’
361
It is quite difficult, therefore, to point to one folk structure
and claim that Yeats based his performance on it. If we take the method he devised, along

360
See ‘By the Roadside’ in The Celtic Twilight.

361
Cited in Fleming, Debora, A Man Who Does Not Exist: The Irish Peasant in the Work of W. B. Yeats
and J. M. Synge, University of Michigan Press, 1996, p. 66.

207
with Florence Farr, of speaking verse to musical notes, we cannot help noticing the
mixture of “influences” which contributed to its final shape.
Michael Yeats attributes Yeats’s interest in Irish folk song precisely to the importance
of the words over the tune in Irish folk singing.
”Abair amhrán”, a Gaelic singer will say, “say as song”, never “sing a song”,
and he will rarely worry about what tune he uses. No matter how fine his voice
or beautiful the tune, he knows that he will only retain the interest of his
audience if his words are clear and intelligible. This was the characteristic above
which must have aroused Yeats’s life-long interest in folk music.
362

Citing a description by Jack B. Yeats’s biographer, Hilary Pyle, of a feis where Lady
Gregory and Yeats were in attendance, Brian Devin, comments:
At this feis too he [WB] first heard the previously mentioned traditional singing
in the modal scale, known as sean-nós. In this mode, the feeling behind the
words is of equal importance to the music, and Yeats was thrilled. As Foster tells
us: ‘he pursued Hyde obsessively for information about it: the possibilities of the
psaltery remained fixed in his mind.
363

One of the virtues of sean-nós which Yeats appreciated was that it was ‘an established
method midway between singing and speech.’
364
I doubt that this particular tradition was
the “prototype” for Yeats and Farr’s experiments, but it should be counted (perhaps

362
‘W. B. Yeats and Irish Folk Song’, in Southern Folklore Quarterly Vol xxxi, June 1966, Number 2, pp
153-178 (p. 163).

363
Devine, Brian, Yeats, the Master of Sound. An investigation of the technical and aural achievements of
William Butler Yeats, Colin Smythe Ltd: Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, 2006, p. 146.

364
Ibid., p. 146. Daniel Corkery also points to the importance of speaking, as opposed to singing, in the
Irish folk tradition. His specific focus is the “hidden” culture of Gaelic Munster during the eighteenth
century where Corkery finds remants of medieval Gaelic culture. After citing a Gealic poem, Corkery
writes: ‘Read the Irish aloud, and it reads well, noticing how it rises up and up… So, in the Irish speaking
districts, when a traditional singers has lifted us high in the viewless wings of poesy, he, suddenly, in the
last cadence, breaks the spell, and brings us back to earth. How does he do it? By suddenly dropping the
music out of the song, speaking the last few words, and in the most casual, conversational tone, too, instead
of singing them.’ (see Corkery, Daniel, The Hidden Ireland. A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth
Century, Gill and Macmillan: Dublin, 1975, first published 1924, p. 253)
208
mostly because it provided encouragement that a hybrid method combining words and
music was possible) as one of the tributaries which helped shape the psaltery method.
Both Yeats and Farr stressed the importance of Irish folk song as a model for their
experiments with the music of speech. Yeats’s reply to the editor of the Academy, 7 June
1902, explicitly links this new art of speaking to notes to folk practice.
If Mr. Symons will then make an extremely simple tune, like the very simplest
folk-music, an record it and speak his poem to this tune, he will find, I think, that
this new art is also an extremely old one, and that it is probably that we should
sometimes speak an old folk song instead of singing it, as we understand singing.
I have heard Irish country-women, whose singing is called “traditional Irish
singing”, speak their little songs precisely as Miss Farr does some of hers, only
with rather less drama. The tune must be very simple, for if there are more than a
few notes the one tune will not adopt itself to the emotions of different verses.
365

In a letter to William Archer, 18 June 1902, Yeats jubilantly remarked:

I have been round at Dolmetwch’s this evening and have found to my very great
surprise that I have made the poems of mine which have the most “folk” feeling,
to actually little tunes, much like those A. E. writes to. What is most astonishing
of all my little tune, “The Song of the Old Mother” is in the Irish gaped scale.
366

In one of his American lectures, Yeats imagines an ideal folk audience who will
appreciate this new art:
I have heard Miss Farr chant or lilt Morris’ “Translation of Homer” in such a
way that I am certain it would have delighted peasants or children; and the
moment one goes back to this ancient art of musical speech all kinds of
delightful artifices of speech awake again to life.
367

At the same time, this art had a precedent in ancient Greece:

365
Yeasts, W. B., The Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 1901 - 1904, general editor, John Kelly, ed. by John Kelly
and Ronald Schuchard, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1994, p. 197.

366
Ibid., p. 204.

367
Four Lectures by W. B. Yeats 1902-4, p. 88.

209

The old theatre was always a place for oratory. The Greeks used to speak their
lines to some kind of musical notation. They did not sing them as we understand
singing, but they spoke them on definite musical notes and they cared so little
for acting as we understand acting that they wore masks upon their faces and
increased that stature by artificial means.
368

To complicate things, this was also an art-form in bardic Ireland:

I have for some years now been studying rhythmical speech with Mr. Arnold
Dolmetsch and Miss Florence Farr. We have begun by studying as its most
perfect form the speech with fixed musical notes like that of the Greeks and of
the ancient bards. Out object is to rediscover a method of speaking which will be
the most perfect possible expression of the poet’s music.
369

It is clear that in his chanting experiments, Yeats was aligning the folk with the bard.
That was a way of appropriating the Irish folk tradition both directly and indirectly. As
part of a promotion of oral culture in general, Yeats cast himself in the role of an oral folk
who was both peasant and aristocrat.
370
As Ronald Schuchard notes, Yeats’s view was
that ‘In the distant past the art of the people mingled with the art of the coteries, and true
folk poetry could once again have its counterpart in written poetry that is established

368
Ibid., p. 99.

369
Ibid., p. 99.

370
Bardic poetry, as Bergin Osborn describes it, is highly ornate, traditional in style and language, and
directed towards an exclusive audience. The profession of the file or bard was confined, much like other
professions, to specific families which belonged to a hereditary caste in aristocratic society. (cf. Irish
Bardic Poetry. Texts and translations, together with an introductory lecture, compiled and edited by David
Greene and Fergus Kelly, The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1970, p. 4) The style in which these
poems were written followed specific formulas handed down from generation to generation; it was ‘a
standard literary dialect which remained unchanged for five hundred years (Ibid., p. 13).’ This ‘artificial
standard’ created a ‘normalized’ language admitted ‘only such forms and usages as had the sanction of
earlier poets of high repute, everything else being rigorously excluded.’ (p. 13). Most of these poems were
in an ‘unrhythmical metre which could not be set to any regular melody.’ (p. 21) ‘There are several poems
in praise of the harp, but the literary classes appear to have looked down upon the singer, whom they
classed with the geócach or buffoon. Thomas Moore’s picture of the bard singing and playing in the
intervals of draining bumpers would have shocked the real bard as something very vulgar indeed.’ These
poems were not songs – songs were the property of popular culture. While Osborn separates the bardic
from the popular, Yeats combines the two elements in a hybrid.

210
upon the unwritten.’
371
Part of the Gaelic ancestry, of which the peasant partook, was ‘the
ability to hear ‘cadences of music’ in poetic speech.
372
Other branches springing from the
same root were the plain-chant, the magical incantation, recitative as it was supposedly
done at the beginning of its history, and various kinds of formulaic oral delivery. What
these had in commong was that they all were methods of speaking in a regulated way. All
of these ingredients where thrown in the mix, but it is significant that whenever they
could, Yeats and Farr (and especially Yeats) tried to present their method as a natural
descendant of local folk tradition. For Yeats, speaking to the psaltery (which at one point
became something of a movement) was one of his key contributions to the Celtic
renaissance. If Yeats imagined himself as a bard, his other model of performance was the
folk poet. The two together constitute the same “mask”.
The ‘music of speech’ which so moved Yeats is often described as a haunting sound, a
voice to which the poet can partake the way generations of folk performers had done. It
became the task of the poet to invigorate his verse with this voice. In actual practice, this
amounted to a combination of rhythm and vocality. On the receiving end, the ideal
audience which Yeats imagines as targeting by both his theater and chanting experiments

371
‘The Minstrel in the Theatre’, p. 13). Daniel Corkery makes a similar claim about Irish culture in the
eighteenth century. The focus of The Hidden Ireland is Gaelic culture in Munster where remnant of ancient
Gaelic civilization still survived among the people. ‘[t]he Gaelic people of that century [the eighteenth]
were not a mob, as every picture given of them … would lead one to think … They were the residuary
legatees of a civilisation that was more than a thousand years old… With that civilisation they were still in
living contact, acquainted with its history; and such of its forms as had not become quite impossible in their
way of life they still piously practised. (see The Hidden Ireland, p. 41) Corkery describes in detail the ‘big
Gaelic House’ which was the hub of all activities. To all intents and purposes, these big houses (in the
counties Cork and Kerry and elsewhere) which had survived imperial legislation were like ‘the castles of
the Middle Ages’ (p. 50) and the center of the life of the communities surrounding them. Not only
culturally but also physically, the peasant co-habited with the aristocratic land-holder.

372
Cited in Marcus, Phillip, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance, p. 170.
211
was modeled on the “culture of the cottage” with its listening proficiency, sensitivity to
rhythm, and intensely imaginative linguistic life.
373
The psaltery movement as a whole
seems to have been conceived as part of a return to folk culture, as G.K. Chesterton
suggests in the Daily News (May 16, 1903):
Miss Florence Farr has developed a beautiful manner of so intoning some
selections on a weird-looking instrument as to illustrate Mr. Yeats’s meaning
almost to perfection. And it is Mr. Yeats’s theory that the remedy – at least the
only feasible remedy at present, for this reign if vulgarity and cynical inattention,
which now , as he said in a fine phrase, “has made all the arts outlawed” – is to
draw yet closer to the circle of culture and to go on performing as specialties the
things which were once universal habits of men, singing, telling stories, and
celebrating festivals.
374

John Masefield remembers a Monday evening in the presence of Lady Gregory and
Yeats. After Lady Gregory had read aloud ‘some of the poems of Russell and Johnson
(‘she read very clearly and agreeably, with a just emphasis and a good sense of
rhythm’),Yeats read aloud a poem by Dora Sigerson: Cean Duv Deelish (Dear Black
Head):
His reading was unlike that of any other man. He stressed the rhythm till it
almost became a chant; he went with speed, marking every beat and dwelling on
his vowels. That wavering ecstatic song, then heard by me for the first time, was
to remain with me for years.
375

373
Schuchard makes the same connection between Yeats’s chanting experiments and his idea of a listening
folk audience. He also recognizes that this idea (which was not an entirely imaginative construction since it
was based, to a large extent, on Yeats’s first-hand experience among the Irish peasants) was combined with
his romantic vision of Ireland’s bardic past. See Schuchard, Ronald, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the
Revival of the Bardic Arts, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp 200-1.

374
The Collected Letters, Vol. 3, p. 365, n. 2.

375
Masefield, John, Some Memories of W. B. Yeats, The Macmillan Company: New York, 1940, pp 14-5.
As Matthew Spangler points out, ‘[S]tarting with his earliest poetry and plays, Yeats’s verse made use of
strong and carefully placed beats that demanded oral performance for their full realization.’ (Spangler,
Matthew, ‘”Haunted to the Edge of Trance”: Performance and Orality in the Early Poems of W. B. Yeats’
in New Hibernia Review/ Iris Éireannach Nua, 10:2 (Summer/ Samhradh, 2006), 140 – 156 (p. 142))
Spangler is, to my knowledge, one of two scholars who have dared to place the mysterious method of
212

Last but not least in mix is the so-called chanting with which other Irish authors were
experimenting. Both and Synge and AE had their own views on what this chant should
constitute. As Declan Kiberd has pointed out, Synge had observed a ‘sort of chant’ in the
speech of Aran peasants.
376
‘Synge, like Yeats and MacDonagh, believed that chanting
had ties to the native culture…’ ‘The style helped to establish a non-English atmosphere,
while the chanting created a connection to the ancient native Irish culture. Yeats was not
the only writer of the time to believe that chanting was a tie to the precolonized Irish
experience.’
377
The right inflection of the voice was an important ingredient in the
acoustic make-up of Synge’s plays performed in the Abbey. As Nelson Ritschel points

speaking to notes within the larger framework of Yeats’s theories of poetic enactment. To do that is to take
this method seriously – something which few scholars have done. He includes the method of speaking to
the psaltery in his considerations of Yeats’s holistic performative act but does not examine it beyond the
brief mention. His focus is exlusively on rhythmic structures in Yeats’s poetry: ‘rhythmic repetition,
additive structuring, attenuated sentences, and deliberate syntactic ambiguities.’ (see ibid., p. 156) Yeats
himself emphasized that the new method of speaking facilitated the rhythm of poetic speech. At times,
attention to rhythm was the only virture he mentioned when referring to the new method. If the method
helped with anything, it was the natural rhythm of speech – an essential ingredient which, according to
Yeats, had been forgotten or neglected in many other methods of performance. Spangler himself does not
make the connection between the method and its relevance for poetic rhythm. This connection is made by
Ronald Shuchard, who studies the chanting in relation to modernist experimentation with prosody. His
focus is mostly on the social aspect of the chanting movement and its relation to imagism. His study is
valuable since it provides historical context on how the chanting was accepted or mocked by other
modernists as well as on the fact that Farr’s book describing the method was strategically positioned as a
response to the imagists. Schuchard describes a conflictual setting, with two camps defending their own
vision of modernist poetics: the auditory versus the imagistic. On rare occasions, Schuchard drops some
hints about what the method actually consisted of but he is sometimes wrong in the details (see his articles
‘“As Regarding Rhythm”: Yeats and the Imagists’ in Yeats. An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, Vol.
2, 1984, ed. Richard Finneran, pp 209-226 and ‘The Minstrel in the Theatre: Arnold, Chaucer, and Yeats’s
New Spiritual Democracy’, in Yeats Annual No. 2, Richard J. Finneran, ed. Macmillan Press: London, 1983,
pp. 3-24). Schuchard’s recent monograph (see note 373 above) does not go beyond his earlier articles in
terms of describing the actual method.

376
Synge and the Irish Language, p. 212.

377
Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Synge and Irish Nationalism. The Precursor to Revolution, Greenwood
Press: Westport, Connecticut, 2002, p. 80.

213
out, the style which Frank Fay favored in the Abbey – and which both Yeats and Synge
agreed with – required the full use of intonation and the music of speech. As Constant
Coquelin expressed it in his ‘Actors and Acting’ – a paper published in 1887 – the actor’s
voice ‘should be supple, expressive, and rich in modifications of tone.’ The actor ‘should
be able to ring the changes from the clarinet to the bugle…’
378
Dialectal speech was of
course more suited to this kind of thing
379
, but the dramatic method also contributed:
‘Actors working from a restrained approach that emphasized the spoken word through a
chant of chant like delivery seems ideal for Synge’s dramatic texts.’
380

To sum up, Yeats borrowed ideas of how to chant from a mixture of traditions, and the
final product was a hybrid between 1) the imagined origin of chanting in bardic recitation
– a type of delivery which the folk had preserved; 2) the chant-like delivery of peasant
speech; 3) the folk tradition of “speaking” a song; 4) qualities which Yeats took from his
model – the folk performer – and on the basis of which he constructed his ideal of
chanting; 5) Farr’s contribution and the advice of musicians and other non-specialists
who must have weighed in as Yeats and Farr were working out the specific details of the
artistic method. In all of these ingredients (even the last one), the importance of folk
tradition is unquestionable. The fact that the method is an imaginative construction based
on diverse components (and in that sense, the method is an “invention”) does not reduce

378
Cited in ibid., p. 77.

379
Fay himself had praised the Irish way of speaking and the similarity of the ‘Irish voice’ to the French
voice in their capacity to avoid the monotone, in the ‘upward tendency of the voice at the end of a
sentence.’ (see ibid.)

380
Ibid., p. 81.
214
the role of folklore for each one of them. Over and above the specific details, the context
of performance, as well as the mechanism of transmission of the method, was also
modeled on the folkloric enactment. What remains now is to reconstruct this relic in the
history of poetic speech. We stumble upon it like an archeologist who discovers an
ancient urn of unknown origin. If Yeats’s tobacco jar could still speak, what would be the
story it tells?
381

***
What exactly did Yeats’s theories of performance amount to? This is a difficult
question shrouded in mystery. One can only rely on fragments and hints scattered
throughout his poetry, his essays, and his correspondence as well as on witnesses who
attended his demonstration lectures, exchanged theories and discussed the subject of the
speaking of poetry. One can still reconstruct, however risky this procedure this might
seem, Yeats’s folk act. In what follows, the attempt to piece together an amorphous body
of clues will be focused on four main areas:
(1) Analysis, aided by “musical” notation, of Yeats’s ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of
Heaven’ with close attention paid to the acoustic and rhythmic make-up of the poem.
(2) Yeats and Florence Farr’s experiments with various ways of accompanying verse
and the demonstration lectures on speaking verse to musical notes.

381
Cf. the commemorative poem ‘On His Tobacco Jar’ by John Masefield in Some Memories of W. B.
Yeats, The Macmillan Company: New York, 1940, pp 16-7: ‘This dull red earthen jar was on his table/
When Lady Gregory took up the script/ And read Synge’s earliest plays to the small group./ It stood amidst
our pleasure and Synge’s pride. It stood among the first experiments/ Of speaking poetry to notes of music,/
When Florence Farr, who died a Buddhist nun, / Took up the psaltery which Dolmetsch made/ And spoke
Ulysses taking up the bow/ Or sang about the lover and his lass.’
215
(3) Various ways in which music and poetry interact as evidenced by Yeats’s
collaboration with musicians, his broadcasts, and his views on folk music.
(4) Yeats’s later work and its debt to the tradition of the popular ballad.
The craft of verse
The rhythmic suggestiveness of Yeats’s verse has been amply demonstrated by
numerous analysts. Scholars stress Yeats’s ability to escape from the routine of the
iambic pentameter as well as his complex sound patters and rhyme schemes which add
further complexity to the rhythmic make-up of his verse. Yet, as Richard Taylor has
pointed out, analysis of the rhythmical variety of the poems should not be limited to
statements demonstrating merely the ‘loosening of strict iambic patterns.’
382
As Taylor
asserts, ‘the substitution for one metrical unit for another’ (e.g. a dactyl for an iamb)
‘does not account for changes of modulation as well as tempo…’
383
There is ‘much
besides’ that one can uncover in Yeats’s consciously crafted rhythm-centered poetry.
It is true that one cannot go very far if one works with the assumption that there is an
‘ideal’ unit which serves as a template for both consistency and variation. Rhythmic
patters consist of more than one or two ‘identical units’ against which variations are to be
‘played off’. Taylor proposes a ‘more complex descriptive device’
384
which includes the
marking of beats and offbeats ‘as distributed variously within a verse rather than confined
to a metrical foot.’ This type of scansion is ‘predicated on the natural alternation’ of beats

382
‘Metrical Variation in Yeats’s Verse’ in Yeats Annual No. 8, ed. Warwick Gould, Macmillan Press,
1991, pp 21-38.

383
Ibid., p. 21.

384
Ibid., p. 23.
216
and offbeats. In many ways, Taylor’s approach is liberating but it still has some
drawbacks. For one thing, what is a ‘natural alternation’? (Clearly, Taylor’s device
privileges the beats; is this natural?) For another, at times the beat-offbeat group begins to
look too much like a metric unit as lines are scanned as three- or four-beat sets. The
tempo is often forced to fit the mold of the unit without allowing room for pauses as, for
instance, in the line ‘Are changed, changed utterly’, where three metrical units are said to
be found. But one should not ignore the possibility for an all-important pause to appear
between the first and the second ‘changed’. Following Taylor’s scansion, we should read
this line as:
Are changed, changed utterly
o B ô B ô B ǒ
where ‘ô’ is an ‘implied offbeat … presumed to be present between two stressed syllables,
and ‘ǒ’ is an ‘unrealized offbeat.’
385
But if we push the idea of tempo (with its pauses and
less predictable upbeats), we can scan the same line (allowing for a longer pause) as:
Are changed, changed utterly
o B o [B] o [B] o
where [B] is Taylor’s ‘unrealized beat’
386
and both the second ‘changed’ and the stressed
syllable of ‘utterly’ are actually offbeats.
This is only a slight modification of Taylor’s scansion, but it is important in that it
allows for a more upbeat transcription of the rhythm of Yeats’s verse. More significantly,
the tempo in Taylor’s scansion is assumed to be even, without allowance being made for

385
Ibid., p. 24.

386
Taylor does well to recognize unrealized upbeats but rarely finds them in his examples.
217
passages which are better heard as speedied up or slowed down. In the line ‘And
Connolly and Pearse’, the ‘ly’ of Connolly is heard as an implied beat. This is so only
because of the assumption that beats must alternate with offbeats with a regularity, which
is actually not as ‘natural’ as the descriptive device requires it to be. The number of
metric units (‘o-B’s) is too often artificial.
The notion of breaking away from traditional scansion is, however, valuable, and
Taylor’s method does go a long way in paying attention to the subtleties of Yeats’s
rhythms. In what follows, I propose an even looser and more liberating device, which
transcribes syllables according to their duration by hearing them as if they were drum
notes. In place of unrealized offbeats, this device simply has a drum note of a shorter
duration. Pauses are also allowed for as are those stressed syllables which are actually
better seen as offbeats. The “musical” notation is complemented by the usual markers in
music scoresheets such as dim (diminuendo, for a passage which is to be slowed down),
accel. (accelerando: speed up), crescendo (where the voice is heard as rising in pitch), etc.
I have provided a notation in “drum-syllables” which corresponds to the drum marks as
follows:
‘ґ’ ~ ‘TA’ equals a quarter note; ‘ך’~ ‘Ta–’ is an eighth note; ‘ו’ ~ ‘ta:’, a sixteenth;
‘(م )’ is a pause of optional duration; and ‘·’ is a lengthening equal to a sixteenth note: so,
for instance, ך ·(Ta– : ) is an eighth note extended to equal three sixteenth notes.

In addition, I have marked the downbeat with ‘↓’, the offbeat with ‘↑’, and pauses with

‘(*)’.

218
Example:
ך $ ך· ו ґ
Now and in time to BE
Ta– ta: ta: Ta– : ta: TA

↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ (*)↓

As a result of the ‘to’ hanging in mid-air preceded by a silence of a sixteenth length
longer than expected, the fall of the downbeat is all the more pronounced on the ‘BE’.
This type of syncopation is only a small example of the surprises which Yeats’s poems
often hold once we adopt a rhythmic framework other than the customary division based
on metrical feet such as iambs, dactyls, etc. Taylor’s scansion usually does not allow
room for syncopation or for slightly elongated beats and offbeats. His ‘time to be’ is
rendered as ‘B-o-B’. The effect of the slight delay (registered in my notation) makes
‘time’ sound longer and ‘to be’ a bit more emphatic and, as it were, estranged, from the
rest of the line. One can think of a classical musician who performs the notes not
according to the beat of a peremptory metronome but with more “feeling”, allowing the
melody to breathe just where it needs it and leaving a hair’s breadth of silence between
notes for additional effect. These pauses/silences interrupt the metronomic regularity of
the B-o sequence and thus bring the verse closer to actual speech.
The following is a “musical” transcription of Yeats’s ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of
Heaven’
387
, a poem which looks like it was almost perversely written to experiment with
rhythm – so varied are the rhythms from line to line, so wonderful the effects. One is
transported into a poetic space where there are no metric feet, where the voice treads

387
The Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Michael O’Neill, Routledge, 2004, p. 111.
219
softly as if walking on offbeat air. Arrows are used to mark ascending or descending
pitch; other musical effects especially relevant to the speaking voice include things like
‘staccato’, ‘vibrato’ (vibr.), rubato (‘rough’), etc. I have used these very sparingly, but a
full musical notation would register these effects.
One more thing should be said in connection with the insistence on the downbeat in
most traditional scansions: the privileging of the downbeat can be avoided by
relinquishing the idea that a stressed syllable should coincide precisely with the exact
moment when the downbeat comes to rest. In the line ‘enwrought with golden and silver
light’, the word ‘light’ is marked as a downbeat, but this need not mean that it cannot be
said a fraction of a second earlier. In other words, the downbeat is not a short percussive
split-second on which the whole weight of the rhythm falls; rather, it is an elongated
stretch of time which can be used productively to sound stressed syllables around the
downbeat moment. Musicians often talk about the ability to dance around the downbeat;
thus the word ‘light’ can be spoken in a way which anticipates, but does not exactly
coincide, with this moment. I have marked it with a bracketed colon, ‘(:)’. This strategy
could be used more consistently than I have indicated here, depending on the taste of the
speaker.

220
‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’: Andantino solemne
dim. accel...
↓ ↑ (*) ↓ (*)↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓
un poco rubato
Had I (vibr.) theheavens’embroidered cloths,

ta : Ta– : ta:Ta-Ta-Ta-Ta-Ta-(Ta)-TA
(3) (3)
388

ו ך· (م ) ( ) ו ך ך ך ך ך(ך ) ґ

***
↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ (:)↓
Enwrought withgolden and silver light,

ta : Ta– : ta :Ta-Ta-Ta- ta: Ta– : TA
(3)
ו ך· ו ך ך ך ו ך· ґ

***
stacc.
↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ (*) ↑ ↓ ↑
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
ta: Ta– ta : ta : Ta– ta : ta : Ta– : ta :
ו ך $ ך( ) $ ך· ו(م ) ( )

***
accel. dim.
↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑
Of night and light and the half-light,
ta: Ta– - ta: Ta– ta : ta : Ta– : ta :
ו ך· ו ך $ ך· ו(م ) ( )

388
The mark ‘(3)’ is used when three equal notes are to be fitted within the space of a beat or a half-beat,
e.g. three eighth notes equaling a quarter note or three sixteenths equaling an eighth note.
221
***
very even dim.
↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ (*) ↑ ↓ ↓ ↑ (:)↓ ↑
I would spread the cloths under your feet: ~ or, perhaps better: cloths underyourfeet
$ ך· ו ך ( ) ו $ ґ ך· ו ך ך ך
(3) (3)
ta : ta : Ta– : ta : Ta– ta : ta : ta : TA

***
dim. accel.
↑ ↓ (*) ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓
But I, (vibr.) being poor, have only my dreams;
ta: Ta– : ta:ta : Ta– : ta : Ta-Ta-Ta- TA
(3)
ו ך ( ) $ ך· ו ך ך ך ґ

***
even
↑ ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑ ↓
I have spread my dreams under your feet; ~ see alternative above
$ ך· ו ך ו $ ґ
(3)
ta : ta : Ta– : ta : Ta– ta : ta : ta : TA

***

↓ ↑ ↓(*)↑(*) ↓ ↑ ↓ ↑
un poco accel.
Tread softly because youtread on my dreams
Ta – ta : ta : ta : ta : ta : Ta– ta : ta: TA
(3)
ך $ (م ) ( ) ו $ ך $ ґ

It is hard to avoid slipping into metronomic regularity in the attempt to “normalize”
spoken verse. Phrase such as ‘cloths under your feet’ are particularly resistant to any type
of scansion.
222
Speaking to the psaltery
A caricaturistic sketch of Yeats’s’ time in America depicts a Yeats hanging out from
the window of a train in front of which stands a small motley audience of indigenous
Indians decked out in full regalia, a lady in ribbons, a moustached face under a sombrero
hat, and a horse-rider in the distance wielding pistols in both hands. A nondescript man
holding a gun keeps guard in front of the train stopped in the middle of the desert. The
caption of Jack Yeats’s cartoon reads: ‘This is Willy lecturing on Speaking to the Psaltery
in the Wild and Woolly West.’
389
To Willy, speaking to notes was serious business.
Together with chanting and drama, it was part of the ‘more practical sides of [his]
work.’
390

In England, Yeats’s public act was to have his theories performed by himself with the
help of Florence Farr and others. Farr trained disciples, more psalteries were produced,
classes were taken, and, for a moment, the new art had become a full-fledged movement.
Of all the trainees in the new art, Farr was the most adept at accompanying herself on the
psaltery and in speaking in a melodious manner which was variously described as
intoning, chanting, or speaking. Yeats could only chant. The chanting experiments with
Florence Farr went on for 22 years and would certainly have continued for longer than
that had not Farr decided to leave for Ceylon. Ronald Schuchard describes the last
moments of the collaboration:
Yeats returned to London inspired by Tagore to reactivate his plan for reviving
the oral tradition by training reciters to chant and carry poetry to the people once

389
Collected Letters Vol. 3, 1901 - 1904, p. 533.

390
Letter to Lady Gregory, 8 May, 1903 (in Collected Letters Vol. 3, 1901 - 1904, p. 363).
223
again. But in September 1912 he discovered that Farr had decided to lay down
the burdern of the psaltery… Her last act before sailing was to return the psaltery
to Yeats … He was bereft…
391

While on his American lecture tours, he traveled alone (as did Farr). He easily glided
from descriptions of Ireland’s folk revival to his own contribution as a manager of ‘a
little theatre’ to the performance of Irish identity by getting back to folk origins.
392

391
Schuchard, Ronald, ‘“As Regarding Rhythm”: Yeats and the Imagists’ in Yeats. An Annual of Critical
and Textual Studies, Vol. 2, 1984, ed. Richard Finneran, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, pp 209-226 (p.
224)

392
Yeasts gave four different lectures on his American lectures tours. Though the lectures are more or less
separate, he would borrow content from one lecture to the next and sometimes he would improvise. The
four topics on which Yeats lectured in front of American audiences include: ‘The Intellectual Revival in
Ireland’, ‘The Heroic Literature of Ireland’, ‘The Theater and What it Might Be’, and ‘Poetry in the Old
Time and in the New’. Yeats also borrowed from his illustration lectures which he had delivered in
England together with Florence Farr and others on ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, but since Farr was not
traveling with him in America, he was to do the speaking to notes by himself. The typescripts Richard
Londraville uses (in his ‘Four Lectures by W. B. Yeats 1902-4’, ed. by Richard Londraville, Yeats Annual
8, pp 78 ff) were acquired from Mrs Jeanne Foster who knew Yeats and John Quinne. She is the owner of
the typescripts and had acquired them from Quinn who had gotten them from Yeats himself after Quinn
‘had arranged the 1903-4 tour’ (cf. ‘Four Lectures by W. B. Yeats 1902-4’, p.78). Here is an example of
how Yeats would weave in his performance of spoken verse within the larger performative framework of a
lecture:
‘There is no tradition for us [i.e.‘we who write in English’] to appeal to, no elaborate past life of the
people for us to preserve a little longer from the great deluge. But there is one thing which we may
learn from the folk or the poetry of the folk – we need not trust always to the written book… A poem
that is written and not spoken is by just so much removed from the common life that we all live.
Music that is written without full respect for words, that obliterates the words, that obliterates the speech, is
also removed from life, from the common life we all live. Let us try to bring literature and music again
close to life, which existed for them in the form of speech. I have been working for sometime with Mr.
Arnold Dolmage and Miss Florence Farr to try and discover that ancient art. I think now we have
succeeded. It is possible again to speak, or chant, I know not what the proper word should be, a long
narrative poem so that every word is perfectly expressible. This has meant that music has had to become
very simple; little tunes like folk tunes, which do not draw the attention away from the words. The more
elaborate the rhythm of the poem, the simpler must be the music of the musician, and when you get to
poems elaborate in their rhythm, then one has hardly a tune at all, one does little more than regulate the
notes that the voice speaks. Mr. Arnold Dolmage has invented for this a new stringed instrument, called a
psaltery, and I have heard Miss Florence Farr recite to a great audience – an audience of eight or nine
hundred people – and make every word heard to the end of the house, every phrase and rhythm, very single
word of the poem heard to the farthest corner, and all perfectly expressible. She would repeat over and over
the same little tune, as one hears it repeated in Eastern music, understanding that the rhythm of the poem
will give all the variety that is necessary. It is the rhythm of the poem that is the principal part of the art. In
modern music, one takes a musical phrase and mixes it into another and another, and so on. I have heard
Miss Farr chant or lilt Morris’ “Translation of Homer” in such a way that I am certain it would have
224
Throughout, Yeats’s emphasis is on achieving, in the modern world, the heightened
state that was natural to the folk in ages gone by: ‘When one comes upon something that
a man has said straight out of the mind in a moment of frenzy, one finds that among these
country people there was an almost incredible refinement.’
393
Like the poet Raftery, who
was one of Yeats’s models of a folk poet who used the tradition and whose song has been
taken up by the folk and entered back into the folk tradition, Yeats hoped, and to some
degree, managed, to establish a school of speaking poetry, though it never reached the
widespread popular appeal that he envisaged in his most optimistic moments.
One of Yeats’s rhetorical strategies was to represent his ‘new art’ not as a product of a
coterie but as part of the historic life-cycle of folklore. He let his American audiences
know that what he was really doing was help drive the fateful course of cultural history

delighted peasants or children; and the moment one goes back to this ancient art of musical speech all kinds
of delightful artifices of speech awake again to life. For instance, when you go to Rosetti, to a chorus like

“Ah! then was it all spring weather,
Nay, but we were long together”,

one remembers that in the folk art that chorus would have been taken up by the audience. The old poet
tried as far as he could to bring the people into his song, for he was their expression. Miss Florence Farr
will sing or speak in Dublin shortly, I hope, one or two narrative poems, and I am going to get certain of the
audience to take up the chorus. After a while they will not need teaching; they will take it up themselves.
Then, too, I hope to hear again the ancient tunes which had their words to accompany them. It was a kind
of drama… Miss Farr is already working at this, but she has begun it only lately, and I do not yet know
what are the results. This new art has already been heard on the stage of my little theatre, and I hope
presently to send troubadours, or whatever will be the new word we will adopt, to our patriotic societies,
just as one sends singers and players.’
Here is another typical overture (‘Four Lectures’, p. 84): ‘for a long time now the people who are in
power in the world have taught it to despise tradition; have taught directly or indirectly that the folk tale
and the folk song, that the old village custom and all the ancient culture is something contemptible and
ignorant. Some three or four hundred years ago the power went into the hands of the masters of the written
book and went away from the great unwritten book of the folk, and the written book is still, perhaps always
will be, fully possessed only by those that have leisure. It is a much more natural thing to listen than to
read… To-night I am going to talk to you about the old unwritten poetry and to see if there is any way of
getting it back again and of keeping it alive where it still is.’

393
‘Four Lectures’, p. 85.
225
forward. In this context, Ireland herself had a fateful role to play on the global-historical
stage. She was to help bring back an old dispensation into being:
No, the national movements are not detached outbreaks of race pride. They are
part of a great war, of a war of the past and the future, of a noble past that tries to
keep itself unchanged, hoping, perhaps vainly, the deluge will begin some day to
fall, that the dove will some day return bringing with it a green bough.
394

Yeats saw folklore as a cultural principle waiting to resurface – waiting to be born again
– amidst the deluge of modern civilization. Despite the fact that ‘we’ have ‘suffered a
continual defeat’ in this war, and that ‘we are a very beaten host’, there is a way to
‘victory’. But to win this war, ‘we must somehow or other change our arms and our
formation of battle’. Thus, Yeats’s ‘New Art’ was a return to old traditions waiting to
instantiated once again while his act would be on a par with that of ‘old frieze-coated
men singing their poems to large audiences’ ‘in the Galway towns’.
395
The speaking to
musical notes was one of the weapons in a traditional-modern arsenal which Yeats
imagined himself as possessing.
‘The literature that is of the people … is a literature of stories and little folk songs
imagined by no one can tell who, and handed on from generation to generation by
peasant story tellers and by peasant singers.’ The literature of the people was different
from the written book, ‘where we always speak to strangers.’ Having lost ‘personal
utterance’, we have lost ‘drama’. A way of getting drama back was to ‘to create a
rhythmical chanting manner of speech’ like that of the Greeks who ‘used to speak their
lines to some kind of musical notation. They did not sing them as we understand singing,

394
‘Four Lectures’, p. 86.

395
Ibid., p. 87.
226
but they spoke them on definite musical notes.’ The ‘the musical elements of speech’ was
‘a first movement towards getting back the old poetry.’
396

Finally, Yeats gets to ‘the biggest business of all, how the words of the writer should be

spoken.’ At this point, the typescript of the lecture reads:

< Speaking to notes.>

American audiences were, for the most part, enchanted by Mr. Yeats’s performances.
In England, where Yeats and Farr had given demonstration lectures, the opinion was
more mixed. Eyewitness accounts
397
as well as the ensuing debates and clarifications (in

396
Ibid., pp 102, 91, 99, 91, 96. It is obvious that for Yeats ‘old poetry’ meant a kind of mixed poetic mode
with contributing elements from medieval, Greek, and Irish folk poetry. His “folk” is often a conflation of
several different personalities: the Sligo peasant, the bard, the troubadour, the Greek, etc. Yeats had written
early articles in a comparativist vein establishing connections between various “folk” figures and their
cultures: ‘We wish to preserve the ancient ideal of life. Wherever its custom prevails, there you will find
the folk song, the folk tale, the proverb and the charming manners that come from ancient culture.’ (Ibid., p.
114)

397
Arthur Symons (in Plays, Acting, and Music, London: Duckworth and Co., 1903, pp 24-5) provides a
clear and seemingly non-committal account – in which a note of dismissal creeps in towards the end – of
his listening experience: ‘Now in speaking verse to musical notes, as Mr. Yeats would have us do, we are at
least safe from this danger [i.e. danger of M. Silvain’s method which tended to ‘treat verse in the spirit of
rhetoric, that is to say, to over-emphasise consistently and for effect]. Mr. Yeats, being a poet, knows that
verse is first of all song. In purely lyrical verse, with which he is at present chiefly concerned, the verse
itself has a melody which demands expression by the voice, not only when it is “set to music”, but when it
is said aloud. Every poet when he reads is own verse, reads it with certain inflections of the voice, in what
is often called a “sing-song” way, quite different from the way in which he would read prose. Most poets
aim rather at giving the musical effect, and the atmosphere, the vocal atmosphere, of the poem, than at
emphasising individual meaning. They give, in the musician’s sense, a “reading” of the poem, an
interpretation of the poem as a composition. Mr. Yeats thinks that this kind of reading can be stereotyped,
so to speak, the pitch noted down in musical notes, and reproduced with the help of a simple stringed
instrument. By way of proof, Miss Farr repeated one of Mr. Yeats’ lyrics, as nearly as possible in the way
in which Mr. Yeats himself is accustomed to say it. She took the pitch from certain notes which she had
written down, and which she struck on Mr. Dolmetsch’s psaltery. Now Miss Farr has a beautiful voice, and
a genuine feeling for the beauty of voice. She said the lines better than most people would have said then,
but, to be quite frank, did she say them so as to produce the effect Mr. Yeats himself produces whenever he
repeats those lines? The difference was fundamental. The one was a spontaneous thing, profoundly felt; the
other, a deliberate imitation, in which the fixing of the notes made any personal interpretation, good or bad,
impossible.
I admit that the way in which most actors speak verse is so deplorable that there is much to be said for a
purely mechanical method, even if it should turn actors into little more than human phonographs. Many
actors treat verse as a slightly more stilted kind of prose, and their main aim in saying it is to conceal from
227
public statements on the topic and in Yeats’s personal correspondence) throw further
light on what ‘speaking to notes’ might have sounded like. But the most authoritative
source is probably Florence Farr’s The Music of Speech which offers both theoretical
explanations of her methods of performing and score sheets of musical settings of
poems.
398

The Method
What Yeats refers to as the musicality of poetry is not a type of singing. Indeed Yeats
was at pains to extricate the idea of music from modern hybrids which mixed the spoken
word with music by either supplementing spoken verse with musical accompaniment or
simply singing the verse. Yeats ‘found something better’.
399
It was not singing
400
, ‘never
anything but speech’, though at times the spoken word could be spoken ‘to a little tune’.
So for Yeats accompaniment was at the most a little tune – not full-blown music. ‘A

the audience the fact that it is not prose. They think of nothing but what they take to be the expression, and
when they come to a passage of purely lyric quality they give it as if it were a quotation, having nothing to
do with the rest of the speech. Anything is better than this haphazard way of misdoing things, either M.
Silvain’s oratory or the intoning into which Mr. Yeats’ method would almost certainly drift. But I cannot
feel that it is possible to do much good by a ready-made method of any kind… Let him [the actor], by all
means, study one of Mr. Yeats’ readings, interpreted to him by means of the notes; it will teach him to
unlearn something and to learn something more. But then let him forget his notes and Mr. Yeats’ method, if
he is to make verse live on the stage.’

398
Scores are also to be found appended in Yeats’s article ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ and in one of his
letters.

399
‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ in Yeats, W. B., Early Essays (vol. iv of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats,
general editors Richard Finneran and George Mills Harper), ed. by George Bornstein and R. J. Finnerman,
Scribner: New York, 2007, p. 12.

400
That this way of speaking poetry sounded somewhat like ‘singing’, at least to the ears of some observers,
is evident from F.R. Higgins’s memorial tribute to Yeats: ‘I remember him telling me some years back that
most of his poems were composed to some vague tune, some lilt. Indeed, when we were together, he sang
in his own uncertain, shy way, some of these poems. Whenever these poems were repeated, at later days, he
always sang them to the same halting lilt.’ Scattering Branches: Tributes to the Memory of W.B.Yeats, ed.
Stephen Gwynn (London: Macmillan, 1940), 150. (Cited in Complete Works, Vol iv, p. 344)

228
singing note, a word chanted as they chant in churches, would have spoiled everything’ in
the rhythmic recital which a ‘friend [Florence Farr]’ delivered to Yeats. ‘[N]or was it
reciting, for she spoke to a notation as definite as that of song, using the instrument
[psaltery] which murmured sweetly and faintly, under the spoken sounds, to give her the
changing notes.’ The accompaniment was faint, it was ‘under’ and its sole purpose was
not to stand out on its own but to give the speaking voice ‘its perfect opportunity’. This
art was well known ‘in the ancient world’ and it is within this ancient space that Yeats
makes his acoustic clearing.
401
Yeats wanted to hear the ‘natural pronunciation’ of
words,
402
their ‘natural music’. He had no use for a love-song which ‘pronounced love,
‘lo-o-o-o-o-ve’, or said ‘love’ but ‘did not give it its exact place and weight in the
rhythm.’ Given his lifelong emphasis on ‘passionate syntax’, it is clear that the guiding
principle of speaking is the rhythm of the verse – this could never be compromised by
whatever attempts to sing/chant/speak/recite/intone verses.
Some misunderstanding still exists as to whether the accompaniment was or was not
like Western music in its intervals. Were the intervals, just like those of the folk singer
and some world music, smaller than the semitones of Western music?
403
Yeats refers to a

401
In The Music of Speech (pp. 17-21), Florence Farr states the matter in similar vein: ‘It is only by
listening very carefully to the little tunes in every words that one comes to divine something of the real
meaning of the tradition of magic words … An eight-barred folk-melody has more power to create a lasting
impression on the sources of emotion, if it be repeated often enough, than elaborate orchestral effects.’

402
‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ in op. cit., p. 13.

403
In his article ‘The Minstrel in the Theatre: Arnold, Chaucer, and Yeats’s New Spiritual Democracy’ (in
Yeats Annual No. 2, ed. by Richard Finneran, pp. 3-24), Ronald Schuchard states mistakenly: ‘Where the
songwriter took a poem and tried to express in music the emotions behind it, she tried to express the music
inherent in the poet’s words. The psaltery, by admitting the employment of quarter-tones, lends itself to the
tune of a word and the cadence of a line.’ The psaltery was actually devised to follow the chromatic
229
walk through a Dublin street with Mr. George Russell (‘A.E.’). He had written verses ‘to
a manner of music’ which was unplayable on a wind instrument but a violin could play
‘something like it’. The wind instrument player complained that Russell’s music
‘contained quarter-tones’ which simply could not be played. A violin is closer
presumably because it divides the note in smaller intervals than the wind instrument. But
to really play Russell’s music, one needed an instrument which divides the note in four
gradations: e.g. between C and D, the violin has C-sharp, D-flat. The violin is better than
the wind instrument presumably because it distinguishes between C-sharp and D-flat (the
piano, for instance does not), but to play Russell’s tune, it would have to add a note (a
quarter-interval) somewhere between the C-sharp and the D-flat or between the D-flat
and the D. So a quarter-interval sequence could look something like: C–C-sharp–D-flat –
D-flat*–D.
The voice of the folk singer thrives precisely on these small intervals unplayable by
Western instruments. In that respect, Arabic music, which also divides the note into a
bigger number of intervals was, for Yeats, an ideal. Yeats was talking to professional

intervals of the human voice. It had 13 double strings arranged an octave apart. A “bass” string was
immediately adjacent to its sibling, a treble string. The strings sounded the same note together, with the
base sounding the note an octave lower. The chromatic scale has thirteen intervals: G-G#-A-A#-B-C-C#-D-
D#-E-F-F#-G. The last ‘G’ would be marked in Florence Farr’s notations with a small dot written before
the note: ‘· G’. Arnold Dolmetsch, who reconstructed old instruments, made the psaltery for Farr to speak
to. In some old psalteries, one finds groups of strings – sometimes as many as eight. Dolmetsch must have
borrowed this principle in his version of the instrument which, like a true hybrid, had features typical of
both a plucked psaltery and a lyre. Yeats called it ‘half psaltery, half lyre’. The instrument was plucked
with one hand, the other hand was used to prop it. It had a trapezoid shape with the lower half (the psaltery
part) being a more or less square wooden body with a hole in the middle through which the sound would
escape; the higher part (the lyre) was a trapezoid wooden frame. The upper part of the frame of the
trapezoid had a slanted thin wooden beam on which all the tuning pegs were arranged in one line. The
strings ran all the way from the top slanted side to the bottom of the instrument.

230
musicians who were themselves stressing the use made of smaller intervals and other
peculiarities by non-Western traditions such as the tradition of Bulgarian folk music.
Now, it seems to me that this reference to A.E.’s method has misled some
commentators to think that Yeats’s conception of intervals was identical to that of A.E. It
is not true that Yeast was keen on dividing notes into four segments. He could hardly
hear a whole tone, let alone a quarter tone. What is important to take from his anecdotal
discussion of A.E.’s music is not so much the letter as the spirit. Yeats was keen on hiring
non-professional speakers precisely because they sang a little off. The folk singer could
modulate his or her voice regardless of Western conventions. Ultimately, this premise
should not be seen as one set in stone precisely because Yeats had no ear to tell the exact
difference.
404

It is important to separate Yeats’s practice from that of A.E. not only along the lines of
quarter-intervals. Yeats’s criticism of A.E. has to do with the latter’s lack of variety. ‘He
did not make every poem to a different tune.’ Indeed A.E. only used ‘two quite definite
tunes.’
405
(One can imagine Yeats’s reaction to a sports announcer or, worse, a CNN
newsreader, who has a limited set of cadences/’tunes’ repeated with what to Yeats would
sound as disturbing regularity). We see then that even if Yeats had no ear for intervals, he
could certainly hear cadences, modulations of intonation, i.e. what he calls ‘tunes’.

404
In Samhain 1902, Yeats distinguished his approach from that of his friend A.E.: ‘I have been working
with Miss Farr and Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, who has made a psaltery for the purpose, to perfect a music of
speech which can be recorded in something like ordinary musical notes; while A.E. has got a musician to
record little changes with intervals much smaller than those of modern music.’ (Cited in Complete Works,
Vol. iv, p. 345)

405
‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ in op. cit., pp 13, 14.

231
I, on the other hand, did not often compose to a tune, though I sometimes did,
yet always to notes that could be written down and played on my friend’s organ,
or turned into something like a Gregorian hymn
406
if one sang the ordinary
way… I varied more than Mr. Russell, who never forgot his two tunes, one for
long and one for short lines. When I got to London I gave the notation, as it had
been played on the organ, to … Miss Florence Farr, and she spoke it to me,
giving my words a new quality by the beauty of her voice.
407

At this point, it seems that, as far as intervals go, it all boils down to the friend’s ‘organ’.
This is not yet the psaltery made specially for the purpose of speaking verse to musical
notes.
408

To sum up thus far, for Yeats, musical accompaniment meant notes forming a
monotonous line or a short chromatic line or, at certain places, a very unassuming ‘little
tune’, which was still very far from being anything like Western music. This
accompanying element was meant to help the speaking (not singing
409
) voice which used
a variety of tunes (intonation patters, cadences) and which was mostly guided by the
syntax of the verse.

406
‘A Gregorian hymn is a monophonic system of Christian ritual music also known as plainsong or
plainchant that uses free rhythm and a restricted scale. It is based on the Antiphonarium compiled by
Gregory I (pope, 590-604)’, Complete Works, Vol. iv, 344.

407
‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ in op. cit., p.14. In a letter to William Archer (cf. CL3, 204) Yeats notes: ‘I
have been round at Dolmetsch’s this evening and have found to my surprise that I have made the poems of
mine which have most ‘folk’ feeling, to actual little tunes, much like those of A.E. writes to.’ (cited in
Complete Works, Vol. iv, p. 344).

408
The psaltery’s range is invariably described as corresponding to the chromatic intervals of the human
voice. This is a vague statement as it does not address the quarter-tone question. Precisely because the
human voice has smaller intervals, some commentators have been led to assume, wrongly, that the psaltery
has quarter tones. What the accepted description of Dolmetsch’s psaltery should have said is that its range
corresponded to an octave which contained the standard thirteen chromatic intervals, i.e. semitones, of
Western music found within an octave. Where Florence Farr’s voice comes into the picture is the issue of
where the psaltery’s octave should start. Farr and Dolmetsch must have conferred and decided that the first
note (string) of the psaltery should be Farr’s ‘G’. The psaltery had 26 strings, i.e. thirteen groups of two.

232
Now, the speaking voice had its own tune – and that had to be in unison with the little
tune accompanying it.
But she [Florence Farr] and I soon wandered into the wood of error; we tried
speaking through music in the ordinary way under I know not what evil
influence, until we got to hate the two competing tunes and rhythms that were so
often at discord with one another, the tune and rhythm of the verse and the tune
and rhythm of the music. Then we tried, persuaded by somebody who thought
quarter-tones and less intervals the especial mark of speech as distinct from
singing, to write out what we did in wavy lines. On finding something like these
lines in Tibetan music, we became … confident… but at last Mr. Dolmetsch put
us back to our first thought. He made us a beautiful instrument, half psaltery,
half lyre, which contains, I understand, all the chromatic intervals within the
range of the speaking voice; and he taught us to regulate our speech by the
ordinary musical notes.
410

To the potential charge that the sounding of one persistent note creates monotony,
Yeats responds by pointing to the ‘endless variety of expression’ (even on one note) if the
speaker learns to modulate his or her voice. In that sense, the notation will only be a
starting point – a loose frame of reference which can be expanded based on the occasion.
For instance, a more dramatic moment in the verse might require the slightest modulation
of the voice.
But his new art, new in modern life I mean, will have to train its hearers as well
as its speakers, for it takes time to surrender gladly the gross effects one is
accustomed to, and one may well find mere monotony at first where one soon
learns to find a variety as incalculable as in the outline of faces or in the
expression of eyes.
411

410
Ibid., p. 14. Among other things, this passage seems to resolve the quarter tone question. We are not
talking about anything like exact intervals but rather ‘modulations’ like those of a folk singer who, as Yeats
knew, ‘goes flat’ whenever he wishes.

411
Ibid., p. 16.

233
It seems then that the new art involves a certain amount of trimming the diapason of
ordinary speech (which is ‘formless’) in order to find a grander variety within the stricter
parameters of the type of verse-speaking accompanied by the psaltery. ‘I, at any rate,
from this out mean to write all my longer poems for the stage, and all my shorter ones for
the psaltery, if only some strong angel keep me to my good intentions.’
412
So much for
the 1902 version of this essay.
Yeats added a section in 1907. In a sense, Yeats was returning to an original/primal
stage in the development of music. A return to this ‘very early stage’ would disclose ‘a
state of mind’ of those who ‘love lyric poetry but cannot tell one tune from another
[Yeats?]’. This state of mind is the same one which ‘created music and yet was incapable
of the emotional abstraction which delights in patterns of sound separated from words.’ It
makes sense to assume that this early stage was characterized by a unity of music and
words, or rather that ‘music’ in this sense means the music inherent in words which Yeats
was actually targeting. To write poems means to return to the primeval music of words
which is also the origin of music as we know it. Yeats appended six settings, three of
which were by Miss Farr who accompanied ‘her words upon her psaltery for the most
part’. Two of the other three settings were ‘taken down by Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch from
myself, and one from Mr. A.H. Bullen, a fine scholar of poetry, who hates all music but
that of poetry, and knows no instrument that does not fill him with rage and misery.’
Yeats stresses that there is no one correct way of reciting a poem. ‘[D]ifferent tunes fit
different speakers or different moods of the same speaker, but as a rule the more the

412
Ibid., pp 16-7.
234
music of the verse becomes a movement of the stanza as a whole, at the same time
detaching itself from the sense as in much of Mr. Swinburne’s poetry, the less does the
poet vary in his recitation.’ Presumably variation, which was so important to Yeats, was
mostly consigned to the details of the individual phrase and not to large stanzaic
requirements. The ‘tunes’
413
presumably correspond to groups of voice-pitches within a
single word or phrase, but also, in a more general sense, to different moods which will
themselves vary within a larger recitation or even an individual stanza. At the same time,
as we saw from the 1902 version of the essay, the speaker has to regulate his or her
recitation according to the tune of the psaltery (literally speak to it). It is difficult to tell,
at this point, what accompanies what. It seems that somehow the tune of the voice and
tune of the psaltery are conceived as a unity which is particularly sensitive to the mood of
the verse and even the individual phrase.
There is an important technical point here which is easy to miss. Florence Farr’s note
(in the 1907 version of the essay) clarifies some of the difficulties. The foundation of the
new art, as conceived by Yeats and Dolmetsch, was the individual word. It is only when
one tries to express ‘the inmost meaning of words’
414
that one avoids the natural tendency
to fall into ‘intoning’ as practiced in religious rituals. The power of words and ‘the
delight in the purity of sound’ will ‘make the arts of plain-chant and recitative the great
arts they are described as being by those who first practiced them.’ Since recitative as

413
Dolmetsch would oblige Yeats by composing ‘little tunes’ for him. In a letter to Lady Gregory, 13 June,
1902, Yeats notes: ‘Dolmetsch is now making little tunes for my Wandering Angus and some of my other
things to be spoken to.’ (Cited in Complete Works, Vol. iv, p. 345).

414
‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ in op.cit., p. 19.

235
practised in contemporary opera (i.e. the singing of recitative) was detested by Yeats and
his musical advisors, one is left to assume that Miss Farr had in mind a return to the
essence of recitative rather to its latter-day versions. In this sense, ‘liturgical chants,
plain-song and jubilations or melismata’ will not do as an ideal for the kind of speaking
to verse which Yeats had in mind. What is at stake, rather, is the goal of giving ‘an added
beauty to the words of the poet’
415
as opposed to letting the words melt into formal music.
‘Regulated declamation’ was the foremost component while accompaniment was a mere
complement.
416

Florence Farr’s The Music of Speech (published two years later) rides the crest of the
same wave. As she did in her appended note to the 1907 version of Yeats’s essay, she
here establishes the word as the basic unit of speech. However, judging by the examples

415
Ibid., p. 16.

416
Florence Farr wished to stress her aim as being the same as that of the early practitioners of the art of
voice. And yet, one feels that she desires to stake out her own territory vis-à-vis ‘the authorities’ within this
large artistic field. ‘I made an interesting discovery after I had been elaborating the art of speaking to the
psaltery for some time. I had tried to make it more beautiful than the speaking of priests at High Mass, the
singing of recitative in opera and the speaking through music of actors in melodrama. My discovery was
that those who had invented these arts had all said about them exactly what Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and Mr.
W. B. Yeats said about my art. Any one can prove this for himself who will go to a library and read the
authorities that describe how early liturgical chant, plain-song and jubilations or melismata were adapted
from the ancient traditional music; or if they read the history of the beginning of opera and the ‘nuove
musiche’ by Caccini, or study of music of Monteverdi and Cirissimi, who flourished at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, they will find these masters speak of doing all they can to give an added beauty to the
words of the poet, often using sample vowel sounds when a purely vocal effect was to be made whether of
joy or sorrow. There is no more beautiful sound than the alteration of carolling or keening and a voice
speaking in regulated declamation. The very act of alteration has a peculiar charm.’ (‘Speaking to the
Psaltery’ in op.cit., p. 18) ‘Simple vowels’ chimes in with Yeats’s emphasis on internal modulations within
an otherwise monotonous ‘tune’ or note. Granted, Farr’s emphasis on alteration is a complication. Is one to
infer a keening or caroling (i.e. singing) voice next to the declaiming/speaking voice, or is this first voice
musical only in Yeats’s sense of ‘musical’ (i.e. the music of the spoken word)? Since alteration probably
means alteration of modes of delivery, Miss Farr most likely means a singing voice alternating with a
declaiming voice. These two voices are, in turn, accompanied by the psaltery. Thus, everything that has
been said so far applies only to the declaiming voice. In her desire to alternate, Florence Farr would have
sections of a poem which she indicates as ‘lilted’. See later discussion.

236
she provides, it seems that one can further subdivide into syllables. For example, a one-
syllable word will have one pitch/tone. A longer word (e.g. a three- or four-syllable
Latinism) will have as many as three or four pitches corresponding to the syllables.
417
To
cite a few of Farr’s examples concerning the ‘melody of words’
418
: the word melody can
be said to three notes (‘mel on F, o sinking to C sharp, and dy rising to D’); melodious
involves rising from F to A and then sinking C sharp and D: F-A-C#-D; sarcophagus and
simplicity are spoken in the same way: D-C-Bb-A with ‘falling inflection’; municipal and
orchestration: ‘rise from E to G, then fall to F, E.’ Since in singing, the melody of the
musical idea overrides the inherent melody of the individual word, singing can happen
only between spoken bits and is in any event to be reduced to a minimum.
419

According to Farr, traditions of speaking – such as the incantations in medieval spells,
‘the curse of the bard’, ‘short formulas’ repeated by choirs of priests in the East, etc. – all
attest to the magic spell of words. It is this age-long tradition which Farr was thinking of
reviving. One had only to listen very carefully to the ‘little tunes contained in every
word’ and practice speaking to these definite pitches/notes. Of course, variations could
occur: a word’s musical make-up was not set in stone, and it was ultimately the speaker’s
decision what notes he/she wanted to employ. The virtue of the method lay in its ability
to fix the pitch so that, once the speaker chances upon a particularly apposite combination

417
The strong belief in the music/magic of words may have something to do with Yeats and Farr’s
participation in GD rituals which involved incantations. One thing is certain – they were both trying to be
very “scientific” about things.

418
Farr, Florence, The Music of Speech, Elkin Mathews: London, 1909, p. 19.

419
Yeats praised Farr’s ability to slip in and out of speaking mode into singing mode. It is here, more than
anywhere else, that smaller intervals can be utilized to make the transition seamless.
237
of notes, he/she could note it down and use it for future reference. The exact combination
would also depend on the mood of the poem, on the character speaking, etc. The method
also allowed for the rhythm of the spoken word to be emphasized and therefore avoided
the temptation of succumbing to the rhythm the musical phrase imposed on the poem
when it was sung.
***
In performance, Farr would rarely use more than one note for each word regardless of
the fact that each word possesses several notes. Indeed, as some of the scores show, a
whole line was to be spoken to one sustained note. While in theory a line like We are the
music makers was scored as ‘We(E flat) are(C) the(D) music(E flat-D) makers(C)’, in
actual performance Farr seems not to have made emphatic use of her insight that it ‘is
possible to record the inherent melody of each word’. It seems that the reason for using a
note for each syllable in her theoretical description of her method was simply to highlight
the infinite potential of what must have seemed like a completely ignored aspect of words,
i.e. their hidden musicality. A spoken line in performance looks more like a careful
selection of notes (occurring with less regularity), which is designed both to call attention
to the music of the individual word and to highlight the phrase (and even the line and
beyond) as the basic intonational unit. Thus, Shelley’s ‘Hymn of Pan’ (last lines) was
scored as:
C D E
I sang of the dancing stars,
C A C
I sang of the doedal earth,

238
C
And of heaven, and the giant wars,
And love, and death, and birth.

The method of scoring is somewhat unclear: in some of the scores, one finds an even
smaller number of notes. It seems justifiable to gather all extant scores before one begins
to draw conclusions.
The method of speaking did not stop with this. Even if the speaker has the notes
accompanying the verse, she still had to train her voice to: (1) modulate within the
diapason of the fixed pitch
420
and (2) avoid the temptation of slipping into recitative or
sing-song, let alone song. According to Florence Farr, the spectrum of voice possibilities
includes: singing – chanting – speaking. She emphasizes that her method is not chanting.
‘I simply speak as I would without music.’
421
(Yeats, as evidenced by his later BBC
broadcasts, positions his voice closer to the chanting part of the spectrum. It is perhaps
with this kind of voice, with its elongated vowels, that he would have spoken to notes on
his lecture tours.) However, based on the evidence, it seems that when Farr insists that
she does not chant, she refers only to the strictly spoken part of her performance. She was
known to both speak and ‘lilt’ in certain parts of poems.
422
The difficulty and uncertainty
of the method provoked lively discussion, high praise, doubts, and not a few derisive

420
The solitary ‘C’ accompanying Shelley’s last two lines would provide ample opportunity for modulation.
The psaltery itself seems to have been designed with that end in view: a note was sounded by two adjacent
strings, which offers the modulating voice the diapason of a whole octave.

421
The Music of Speech, p. 17.

422
In Florence Farr’s own words, ‘There is no more beautiful sound than the alteration of carolling or
keening and a voice speaking in regulated declamation. The very act of alteration has a peculiar charm.’
(‘Speaking to the Psaltery’)

239
comments of outright dismissal from observers.
423
As happens with a lot of methods of
performance, the devil is in the details. In the following section, I will try to clarify some
of these details
424
, which will, in the final analysis, forever remain shrouded in mystery.
***
(1) The voice spectrum:
It is not exactly clear what the middle term ‘chant’ stands for. In some instances it is
closer to speaking, in others it sounds like a strange melodious intoning of words. One
thing is clear: it treads a dangerous tightrope as it constantly threatens to degenerate into
something which it is not supposed to be. The threats include: rhetorical speaking (as in a
political speech on the boiler or a sermon); operatic recitative; subjective intonational
cadences spoken in a meaning way (Yeats would have none of this as he insisted on the
objective acoustic qualities of verse); sing-song declamation; everyday conversational
tone (i.e. if one tried to avoid song too much, one could slip into this); intoning (in some
definitions of the word).

423
D. H. Lawrence went as far as mockingly imitating Farr’s performance. Brigit Patmore remembers an
incident involving “Lorenzo” and his reaction to the chanting experiments: ‘Lorenzo began chanting
monotonously, ‘You who are bent and bald and blind….’ Paused, then stretched his thin hands over his
knees delicately, as if an instrument lay there, plucked an imaginary string and whined: ‘Ping …
wa…n…ng.’ Then, three semitones lower: ‘Ping…pi…nng…wang. Deepening his voice, ‘With heavy
heart, staccato ping-wang and a wandering mind.’ And he pinged so violently to show the state of his mind
that our hoots of laughter swept him with us and he couldn’t look holy any longer.’ (Patmore, Brigit, My
Friends When Young, Heinemann: London, 1968, p. 81)

424
The ‘quarter tone issue’ is also relevant here; however, as I indicated earlier, I consider this issue to be
resolved. Yeats inquired about it in his personal correspondence, but there is no hint of it in the evidence
regarding the actual performance of poetry. It was probably something that the collaborators (Yeats, Farr
and Dolmetsch) talked about from a purely theoretical interest, something which they flirted with but which
is ultimately not a part of the method.
240
Joseph Holloway's description emphatically places the new method in the middle of the
spectrum in his account of Yeats and Farr’s demonstration lecture on ‘Speaking to
Musical Notes’:
The experiment was very interesting, but in no way could it be called speaking
to musical notes − call it chanting or intoning or what you will, but not
speaking. Sometimes it was more like to singing than to aught else, with the
exception that the words were always distinctly heard, not like the poet's words
when sung in the usual way…
425

The newness of the delivery must have struck this observer’s ears as song. It is true that,
at times, poems would allow room for actual singing, but this should not be taken to
mean that the method itself was ‘more like singing than to aught else’. One of the scores
extant indicates alternating sections to be spoken and lilted.
426
A poem would thus often
feature various techniques.
427
Evidently, Florence Farr was a real expert in alternating

425
Holloway, Joseph, Joseph Holloway's Abbey Theatre: A Selection from His Unpublished Journal,
Impressions of a Dublin Playgoer, ed. Michael J. O'Neill, Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale,
1967, p 19.

426
This is the ‘Song of Wandering Angus’ (in Collected Letters Vol. 3, 1901 - 1904, pp 365-6; the score is
‘typed on separate sheets, with instructions in FF’s hand’). For instance, first the section (first quatrain)
beginning with ‘I went out to the hazel-wood’ and ending with ‘berry to a thread’ is indicated in the score
as ‘lilted’; it is followed by a hybridized quatrain of two spoken lines (‘And when white moths were on the
wing/ And moth-like stars were flickering out’) and two lilted lines (‘I dropped the berry in a stream/ And
caught a little silver trout.’) The next three quatrains alternate between spoken, lilted, and again spoken.
The last quatrain is another hybrid of lilted and spoken lines. Both the lilted and the spoken sections were
accompanied with notes. It is interesting, moreover, that in hybrid quatrains, the last word of the spoken
section rhymes with end of the lilted section. A good performer really needed to be able to switch modes.
For a discussion of this poem, see section bellow.

427
For his BBC broadcasts, Yeats would stress variety even more by including singing as well as different
accompaniments and actual instrumental music between sections. In a letter to Edmund Dulac (Yeats’s
main collaborator for the broadcasts), June 1, 1937, Yeats indicates a list of poems to be spoken and sung
alternatively with flute music in between poems (in Diana Hobby’s William Butler Yeats and Edmund
Dulac. A Correspondence: 1916-1938, Doctoral Thesis, Rice University Press: 1981, p. 226). This was a
‘different, and I think better, list of poems’ than the previous list submitted in a letter to Dulac, May 27,
1937, which had alternating spoken and sung poems with the poem ‘The Happy Townland’ both spoken
and sung (Ibid., p. 224).

241
various performance modes. Holloway goes on to complain that though the delivery has
‘an air of unconventionality’ about it, ‘[t]his lilting, or what you will, to notes’ was
pleasing and beautiful only ‘for short periods’. [I]f continued for any length of time’, the
delivery would ‘become very trying’. The implication is that this method would not work
for longer poems, let alone drama. Florence Farr seems to have known this as ‘she gave
all short passages or lyrics with slight pauses between’.
428

Another observer explains that the purpose of the accompaniment was ‘to give to the
listener a key to the cadences used by the poet when he created the poem the speaker was
reciting. Miss Farr's voice and oratorical power gave to lovers of poetry a pleasure of the
same kind as that which a great singer would give to lovers of music.’ From this it seems,
that no singing was actually involved.
429

Joseph Hone points to three distinct gradations within the spectrum: ‘Miss Farr would
recite selected pieces with strong rhythmical emphasis, intoning others and chanting a
few to distinct musical phrases.’
430
His second term seems to include a further possibility
positioned between speaking and chanting. Thus the spectrum becomes something like a
continuous line along which Farr could glide at will: speaking-intoning-chanting-singing.
On top of this, one has to fit the lilt somewhere; it is probably between chanting and

428
Yeats himself indicated that the method may not work for drama.

429
Scattering Branches, ed. Stephen Gwynn, The Macmillan Company: New York, 1940, p. 123.

430
Hone, Joseph, W. B. Yeats, 1865-1939, Macmillan: New York, 1943, pp 201- 202.

242
singing.
431
The range of the performance therefore becomes: (rhythmical) speaking-
intoning-chanting-lilting-singing. Yeats thrived mostly on the first three gradations.
(2) Accompaniment:
With the psaltery on the background, the third term (chanting) would have sounded
differently than the more general chanting Yeats refers to in his descriptions of his
method of speaking poems. His ‘chaunt’ is clearly not Farr’s chant as Dolmetsch is quick
to point out
432
:
I once spent a whole night listening to Yeats reciting, and I came to the
conclusion that he did not recognise the inflexions of his own voice. In fact he
had a short phrase of fairly indistinct tones which he employed to recite any of
his poems. This did not interfere with the expression of his readings, which was
very beautiful; but it was useless from my point of view. I then tried Florence
Farr, whose golden voice harmonized perfectly with the notes of the instrument.
I taught her to play. In my own room, with nobody but Yeats and myself present,
it was delightful. But I got engagements for her in America, and it came out that
in public she raised the pitch of her voice and was not capable of following it
with the psaltery as I did myself. Result, the whole thing was discordant; she did
not know it and it ended in failure. I never found a reciter with a sufficiently
musical ear to listen to the instrument and make the voice and the instrument fit
together. . . . I had better results with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, having tuned her
psaltery to a vague drone which did not interfere much with her voice. . . . The
idea of reciting poetry to well-defined musical notes is sound; it may be
reviewed some day given the right exponent.
433

The psaltery was designed to correspond to Farr’s voice but in performance she would
raise the pitch of her voice an octave above pitch of the accompanying notes. Since this
was her method in all performances (not just on the American tour, as Dolmetsch

431
Alternatively, one may assume that the terms ‘lilting’ and ‘intoning’ coincide.

432
Arthur Symons (see his eyewitness account cited above) expressed the same view; the difference is that
he clearly preferred Yeats’s chanting (‘a spontaneous thing’) to Farr’s ‘deliberate imitation’ of it.

433
W. B. Yeats, 1865-1939, pp 201-2.

243
implies), and since Dolmetsch was usually happy with ‘the whole thing’, we must
conclude that he relies on an account from a disenchanted member of the American
audience. At any rate, the tightrope was difficult to tread with steady consistency. At one
point, even Yeats was angry at Farr for failing to show the beautiful method with full
effect.
434

In later years, Yeats would experiment with other types of accompaniment. For his
BBC broadcasts, he included Irish flute for atmospheric effect in between spoken
sections but never as a background to verse. In addition, he was thinking of using
drumming noise as direct accompaniment.
(3) The lilt:
In different contexts, this tricky term means (a) the musical notation accompanying the
verse (b) a concatenation of several notes; (c) a special manner of speaking verse; (d) the
tune to which presumably the poetry was composed; hence, the internal tune of the
poetry
435
; (e) a general description of the sound of the spoken performance (this last
usage is generally employed by external observers). Though Yeats normally prefers the

434
In a letter to Lady Gregory, 6 Jan 1903, Yeats mentions that Mrs Emery made him ‘extremely cross last
night’ because Yeats had ‘some people there whom I had a particular reason … for wanting to hear her at
her best and out of sheer laziness she have the worst performance on the Psaltery.’ (Collected Letters Vol. 3,
1901 - 1904, p. 289) Florence Farr had already been a stranger in her own land as Yeats’s letter to Lady
Gregory, 19 Nov 1902, indicates: ‘Poor Mrs Emery is out of favour with all my psaltery people. Dolmetsch
I hear is angry because she takes money for lessens as he taught her for nothing. Sturge Moore is angry
because she wont work & doesn’t keep tune & he says his own pupils are better…’ (Collected Letters Vol.
3, 1901 - 1904, p. 253).

435
One audience member called this internal tune ‘cadence’ (see the ‘Voice spectrum’ section above;
‘Scattering Branches, p. 123).

244
monotone, at least one score of Yeats’s own poetry includes a small flourish (a little lilt)
of several notes accompanying the same word.
436

(4) The notes:
What is one to make of the only material legacy left of Yeats and Farr’s experiments?
The “musical” scores seem strange, to say the least. Often, solitary notes hang suspended
in mid-air as the voice modulates within their diapason. Sometimes, a group of notes
sound almost like a melody – until one stumbles upon the inevitably unusual harmonic
follow-up. Chromatic “riffs” help the voice descend gradually or creep slowly up the
imaginary scale. The strangeness of the notation cannot but draw attention to the
accompaniment – and yet this it must never do. The accompanying notes are meant to
sound like a far-off echo, faint and persuasive in its suggestion. Occasionally, a note in
brackets is employed (this means a chord), and here one is suddenly in slightly more
comfortable waters.
437

The virtue of the notation is said to lie in its emphasis on the internal rhythm of the
poem as well as in fixing the pitch of the speaker. In a reply to the editor of the Academy,
7 June 1902, Yeats wrote:

436
Regarding the so-called lilt, Yeats, in his later years, admitted that he ‘went over to the enemy’ and had
too many notes sometimes. That the term lilt, when used in a more technical sense to describe the method
of notation, most likely means notation with a relatively bigger number of notes is evident from Yeats’s
letter to Lady Gregory, 9 June, 1902 (in Collected Letters Vol. 3, 1901 - 1904, p. 199): ‘Dolmetsch is doing
some little lilts for one of my poems, (lilts like that Mrs Emery does the “Hymn of Pan” to)’. In some
scores, the regular (trimmed) number of notes is employed but the stage directions indicate that the (section)
of the poem is to be lilted; in this case, lilt is used in its second sense of a mode of delivery.

437
How would Farr have sounded a chord? Since she was using one hand to pluck, going through the triad
of a chord (which, on her psaltery, would have involved plucking three groups of two adjacent strings in
quick succession) would have created a speedy passage which would have interrupted (and thus provided
an interesting change from) the slower tempo of the regular single notes. Alternatively, Farr’s indication of
chords in her notation may simply be a nod to all those performers who would try her scores on other
instruments.
245
SIR – Mr. Arthur Symons has said, in his friendly [sic.] account of my theories
about the speaking of poetry to musical notes, that the fixing of the pitch by a
notation makes “any personal interpretation good or bad impossible.” The
notation of a song is much more elaborate than any notation for speech made by
Mr. Dolmetsch or Miss Farr, and yet the singer finds room enough for “personal
interpretation”. Indeed, I am persuaded that the fixing of pitch gives more
delicacy and beauty to the “personal interpretation”, for it leaves the speaker free
to preoccupy himself with the subtlest modulations. Before we recorded pitch
we made many experiments in rhythmical speech and I found that Miss Farr
would speak a poem with admirable expression and then speak it quite
inefficiently time after time. She found it impossible to recall her moment of
inspiration; but now, though she varies, she does so within a far narrower range.
Her best inspirations are at least as good as they were, while her failures never
sink into disorder. If Mr. Symons will borrow one of my psalteries and speak
one of his own poems to a notation of his own, he will find – for I think his ear
is good enough to speak to the notes without giving them too much attention –
that he will light on all kinds of beautiful or dramatic modulations which would
never have occurred to him had not the cruder effects been fixed by the notation.
He will discover, too, that the right changes of pitch can seldom be got at once,
and that once got they will seem so important that even the best recitation
without fixed notes will generally show itself for mere disorder. Everything in
any art that can be recorded and taught should be recorded and taught, for by
doing so we take a burden from the imagination, which climbs higher in light
armour than in heavy. If Mr. Symons will then make an extremely simple tune,
like the very simplest folk-music, and record it and speak his poem to this tune,
he will find, I think, that this new art is also an extremely old one, and that it is
probably that we should sometimes speak an old folk song instead of singing it,
as we understand singing. I have heard Irish country-women, whose singing is
called “traditional Irish singing”, speak their little songs precisely as Miss Farr
does some of hers, only with rather less drama. The tune must be very simple,
for if there are more than a few notes the one tune will not adopt itself to the
emotions of different verses. Is it not possible that we have been mistaken in
considering this kind of little tunes merely as undeveloped music? It might have
been wiser to have sometimes thought of them as the art of regulated speech,
already perhaps near its decadence. I imagine men spoke their verses first to a
regulated pitch without a tune, and then, eager for variety, spoke to tunes which
gradually became themselves the chief preoccupation until speech died out in
music. From time to time indeed musicians have tried to give speech some
importance, but music has always been their chief preoccupation and their
“recitative” has got its variety from the accompaniment and not from the rhythm
of the verse. If the speaker to musical notes will attend to the subtleties of
rhythm as carefully as a singer attends to the musical inventions of the composer,
this speech will not “drift” into “intoning”. It was said that “the song of Rachel”
246
degenerated into “sing song” with the rest of her company, but that did not prove
that her method of speaking verse was wrong. But after all, if I am right in
claiming antiquity for this art of speaking to musical notes, discussion of its
merits is idle.’
438

The use of musical notes did not mean for Yeats a cut-and-dry method. Rather, the
speaker, whether of poetry or of dramatic verse, had to ‘understand how to discriminate
cadence from cadence, and so cherish the musical lineaments of verse or prose, that he
delights the ear with a continual varied music.’
439
‘Pure musical notes’ (i.e. the new
method) was part of a larger equation when it comes to dramatic verse. Despite Yeats’s
doubts that the speaking to musical notes could be applied to a whole dramatic work, he
still found a place for the new method in drama. The example he gives is the Angel’s part
in his Hour Glass. ‘When one wishes to make the voice immortal or passionless, one
finds it desirable for the player to speak always upon pure musical notes, written out
beforehand and carefully practiced.’ The musical notes gave the Angel’s speech a
‘crystalline quality’ in contrast to ‘the more confused and passionate speaking of the
Wise Man.’ We can infer from these statements that the new method was still the most
suitable for lyrical verse, but we see Yeats struggling to give it a more general application.
As I pointed out earlier, even within a poem, the desired effect was variation as the
speaking to notes was complemented by lilting, speaking without accompaniment, and,
on rare occasions, singing. In the final analysis, it seems safe to conclude that the new

438
Collected Letters Vol. 3, 1901 - 1904, pp 196-7. “Rachel”, i.e. Elisa Félix (1820-58), was a French
Classical drama actress. Frank Fay had told Yeats that ‘until she became careless’, she ’seems to have
preserved the music of verse.’

439
Samhain, 1904, cited in Ellis-Fermor, Una, The Irish Dramatic Movement, Methuen & Co. Ltd: London,
first published 1939, second edition 1954, reprinted 1964, p. 71.
247
method was only a part of a larger performative act and when it was used exclusively, it
was only for short lyrical poems or sections of poems or dramatic verse. (This need not
mean surrender or lack of belief in the new method). However, the desire to produce a
varied effect was often misconstrued as a noncommittal half-way house. To Bernard
Shaw’s ears the overall effect of the performance sounded like ‘nerve-destroying
crooning like the maunderings of an idiot banshee.’
440

‘Some [poems are] spoken in harmony to the notes played on the psaltery.’
441
If this is
the case, then the speaking voice could employ other pitches than those indicated in the
notation. This opens the door for endless experimentation. The voice’s freedom no longer
consists only in modulating within the parameter of the set monotone. One has the option
to create a kind of melody which features counterpoint and other effects, which are more
in tune with the mainstream tradition of music-making.
The uncertainty of the ‘notes’ is nowhere more obvious than in Yeats’s poem ‘The
players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and on Themselves’. In a letter to Arnold
Dolmetsch, 3 June 1902, Yeats wrote: ‘I am writing a “Prayer to the Seven Archangels to
bless the Seven Notes”.
442
This prayer is to be spoken first by two voices and the by one
voice, then the other voice, & then two voices again.’ The poem was specially composed
for a lecture-recital. Yeats had read this poem to ‘Michael Field’ [i.e. Katherine Bradley],

440
Cited in Edward Malins’s A Preface to Yeats, second edition, Longman, 1994, p. 87.

441
The Music of Speech, p. 17.

442
This was the working title for the poem. In Collected Letters, pp 194-5.

248
who mentioned it in her diary.
443
The prayerful mood of the poem invokes the figure of
the folk performer who has to rely on the unwritten tradition for inspiration. The notes of
the tradition are always there, yet the task of the performer is to allow them to sound once
more. The albatross wishes to be appeased.
The poem starts with the ‘First Voice’ worrying that the call of the players is not heard.
In this moment of heavy silence, the tradition does not respond; one has to start on an
empty slate. The ‘Second Voice’ corrects this skepticism: ‘O no, O no! They hurry
down.’ The tradition is swift to descend upon the players with its untold blessings. The
‘Third Voice’ already claims kinship with the angels: ‘O kinsmen/ bless the hands that
play.’ ‘The notes they waken shall live on’ although ‘our hands shall ebb away.’ Yeats’s
book of poems, In The Seven Woods (1903), can, as a whole, be read as a study in the
performance of poetry, and of the folkloric tradition more specifically. Poems like the
titular first poem, ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’, ‘The Arrow’ (with its precisionist “Archer”),
and ‘Adam’s Curse’ (where poetry-making is similar to ‘stitching and unstitching’)
invoke a vision of performative instrumentalism while ‘The Happy Townland’, ‘Never
Give All The Heart’, and ‘The Withering of the Boughs’ might just as easily be actual

443
Field Michael, Works and Days. From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. by T. & D. C. Sturge Moore,
London: John Murray, 1933, p. 263: ‘Yeats read a little prayer to the Psaltery – a most charming poem. All
the Archangels appear in it with shoes of the seven metals. Also he intoned as if to the psaltery
Keats’Bacchic Ode.’ Apart from the reference to the poem, this statement is rather interesting as it confirms
the impression that Yeats’s reading of poems was influenced by the collaborative experiments with the
psaltery. Whether the psaltery was actually accompanying the verse or not, the manner of speaking already
reflected the use of definite notes. Just like in the poem ‘The Players Ask’, the ‘notes that play’ are
somehow present in the air as a folkloric tradition hovering above and haunting the performative act.

249
folk song-poems.
444
With this instrumentalism in mind, let us draw a little closer to the
uncertain notes, for they are all that we have left as a legacy of the mysterious method.
***
Some of the “scores” almost make musical sense but are extremely hard to speak to the
designated notes, while others make sense while spoken to the set notes but sound like
gibberish from a musical point of view. It seems that the method was designed to serve
two distinct purposes: (a) to fix the notes to which the voice speaks without attention to
musical effects; b) to stress the musicality of the choice of notes while insisting on their
being spoken. When Farr describes the method, she almost always seems to be talking
about (a). She hardly mentions the second part (but the notes themselves prove it). Thus,
when she demonstrates the music inherent in a word, she uses the word ‘melody’ and
claims that she naturally says it to three notes: F then C-sharp (below F) then D. This is
quite believable. The word ‘melody’ does sound effective when spoken to these notes.
But in order to hit the right notes, one has to stress the first syllable (‘me-’) quite hard.
Thus, we already see some proof of Yeats’s statement that the method was designed with
attention to rhythm. The word ‘melodious’ is spoken – again very effectively – to the
sequence: F rising to A falling to C-sharp then going to D. Again, to make the A really
heard, one has to stress the secone syllable of ‘meLOdious’.

444
A subsequent edition of the poetry collection was dedicated ‘TO FLORENCE FARR/ The only reciter
of lyric poetry/who is always a delight, because/ of the beauty of her voice and/ the rightness of her
method.’ See, Ronald Schuchard’s essay ‘The Minstrel in the Theatre’ in Yeats Annual No. 2, p. 14.
250
When we come to the full scores, we naturally gravitate to those ones which belong to
the (b) category, i.e. the “musical” or melodious ones. The following is a poem by
Verlaine which Farr speaks thus:
G E •G E D C
La lune blanche luit dans les bois;

Eb •G Eb D C
De chaque branche part une voix

(Ab B Eb) (C E •G)
Sous la ramée … O bien-aimée.
445

The more one tries to speak to these notes, the more natural they sound. At first, the
chords (i.e. the groups of three notes in the brackets) seem strange but are ultimately very
convincing. This “melody” is a rudimentary C scale with an interesting flattened third
(Eb). The last line is absolutely haunting. It must be unconscionably hard to train the
voice so that it does not ‘drift into intoning,’ but we trust that Farr was able to do that.
When we come to the scores of category (a), the difficulties multiply. Yeats happily
noted that his ‘The Song of the Old Mother’ was written, without him knowing it, in the
Irish gapped scale. Аctually, this poem (as it was scored) for the 1903 essay (‘Speaking
to the Psaltery’) is somewhere in between categories (a) and (b). It is written in a clef:
‘the old C clef, which is, I am told, the most reasonable way to write it’.
446
It has a
marked rhythm (6/8) which is typical of a lot of folk music. Transposed into our
customary G clef, the score sounds like this (all the values of the notes correspond to the
middle range of the five lines of the G clef, e.g. the ‘A’ indicated below is the middle A;

445
The Music of Speech, p. 26. The dotted G is the higher G; the brackets represent chords.

446
This is Yeats’s statement in ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, op. cit., p. 14.
251
the B is the next note up and so on until the E which is seven semitones above the A;
after that the melody comes back down to the initial middle A and finally rises to the B
immediately above it):
A A B C# E C# C# B A B
I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow (if we follow the notes, this line sounds
quite playful as opposed to the peevish
tone which we expect from someone
complaining about their daily chores; the
last cadence (C#:B:A:B) sound playful
particularly because of the lilt in the last
three notes; it is also a typically folksy-
sounding cadence)

A A A B C# E C# B A B
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow (the folk cadence is retained)

B B B B B B B B B
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep (until now, the so-called gapped scale was
A B C# E: accommodates an A major and
a B minor which govern the two halves,
respectively, of both the first and the
second line. There is an interesting gap
between the C and the E. In the third line,
the recurrent use of B, which was the final
note in the previous two lines, makes this
melody hard to place. It is a kind of A
major, with an added ninth, that keeps
insisting on its B)
B B B B B B D F# D B
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep (this is a rather interesting line in that the
three notes could clearly form part of a
standard B minor. The cadence for ‘blink
and peep’ is effective in two ways: it
sounds quite appropriate to the sense and
breaks the monotony of the scrubbing and
sweeping.)

A A A B C# E C# C# B A B
And the young lie long and dream in their bed (the A appears here and picks up the first
“melody” or rather fragment of a melody)
252

A A A B C# E E C# C# B A B
Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head

B B B B B B B B B B
And their day goes over in idle-ness (now that we have the melodic line of the
poem, an interesting parallel occurs
between ‘And I must scrub and back and
sweep’ and this line: are we to assume that
‘the young’ are not really better off than
the speaker of this poem?)
B B B B B B D F# D B
And they sigh if the wind but lift a tress (the ‘lift’ from D to F# echoes ‘blink and
peep’)

A B C# E C# C# B A B
While I must work be- cause I am old, (‘I am old’ recalls ‘flicker and glow’ as
well as ‘in their bed’)

A A A B C# E C# C# B A B
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold. (the familiar cadence makes the last phrase
sound particularly Delphic)

When we combine the two melodic fragments (A B C# E C# B A B and B D F# D B)
we get a sort of scale which might be seen as a hybrid between Aadd9 and D. The
combined scale could be represented as A B C# D E F#. The gap in the original fragment
(between C# and E) is clearly closed by the D. From this, we must assume that the
second cadence is only accidental; an assumption which is corroborated by the
preponderance of notes belonging to the first fragment as well as by the typical of much
of folk music unwillingness to commit to a Western major or minor (in this case the B-D-
F#-D-B would mark the melody as a clear B minor).
447
It is only the B which is the note

447
Such is the subtlety of folk music: it seems “simple” in its reduction of notes but in the end this makes
for a hybridity which ends up being more comples than much of Western music with its clear commitment
to chords and major/minor harmonies.
253
shared by both fragments, and which, therefore, serves as a bridge between the two
melodic fragments. The only two instances where the accidental (i.e. less central)
melodic fragment apprears are the phrases ‘blink and peep’ and ‘lift a tress’. I will leave
aside the question of what that does for literary analysis. Suffice it to say here that in both
cases, the monotonous existence of both the old mother and the young is interrupted by
the appearance of a natural phenomenon expressed by an “outside” melody.
The “musical” score for the poem about the old mother (which made Yeats so happy
since he had hit, without knowing, the right celtic note) leaves us with a different sense of
the relationship between music and words than does the description of the method as it
appears in Farr’s primer. One can almost see, in the intermediary case, a musician sitting
at his or her instrument and noting down melodic fragments, going not so much by the
most noteworthy inflections of the speaking voice, but actually thinking of music quite
consciously. This notation, as it was published by Yeats in his essay on speaking to the
psaltery, is the notation given to him by Dolmetsch.
448
The story, as it is told by Yeats,
has it that Yeats presented the poem to Dolmetsch who responded (probably sitting at the
piano) by saying that it was written according to an Irish gapped scale. We may surmise
that the melody, as we have it here, is simply Dolmetsch’s Celtic gift to Yeats, a gift,
moreover, which makes a lot of “musical” sense since it clearly borrows from the logic of
folk music, and which combines words and melody quite admirably. In this sense, this
example should rather be classed with those late broadside ballads which Yeats wrote in
collaboration with musicians such as Dulac and Higgins. There, the words were

448
See ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, op. cit., p. 17.
254
composed first and had to be fitted to music after the fact of their composition. For both
types of experiments, the music would have been deliberately chosen for its folk feeling.
A sub-class in this intermediary case would be the poem spoken to a traditional tune. As
Yeats himself claims:
Sometimes one composes to a remembered air. I wrote and I still speak the
verses that begin ‘Autumn is over the long leaves that love us’ to some
traditional air, though I could not tell that air or any other on another’s lips, and
‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan’ to a modification of the air ‘A Fine Old English
gentleman.’
449

The only difference is that the ballads were meant to be sung while these notes are
supposed to be a preparation for the speaking voice. What exactly Farr would do with
these notes remains a mystery. In what follows, we shall attempt to draw a little closer to
it.
When we come to category (a) proper, we see a somewhat different logic at work.
While Yeats’s statement that the notes form a kind of simple tune like folk tunes seems to
apply to this intermediary category, it is hard to find any musical rhyme or reason in
notations such as the following, where the “tune” is really rudimentary, if it can be said to
exist at all. Yeats’s phrase ‘little tunes’ seems to apply to this case.
LOVE SONG OF CONNACHT
(Translated by Douglas Hyde)

•G F# E C B
She casts a spell, O casts a spell,
Which haunts me more than I can tell.

449
Ibid., p. 18.

255
C
Dearer because she makes me ill
Than one who will to make me
B
well.
450

The little tune here is made up of five notes, with the last two notes repeated twice. This
is a challenging piece: The first line is more or less manageable but once we reach the
second line and following, we lose any sense of musicality. This is perhaps the intention;
at this point, the speaking voice is given free rein to invent molulations over one long
sustained note. Thus ‘Dearer because … make me’ would have been spoken to a
monotonous C, with the voice doing all the variation. I suggest two types of modulation
both of which the construction of the psaltery seems to allow: (1) the voice glides over
the C scale from the low to the high C, repeating that upward climb twice, except that in
the second case, the voice comes back to rest on B, and this produces a nice juxtaposition
with the final note of the previous cadence/scale (which was a C): C D E F G A B C
followed by C D E F G A B C B. The number of syllables in two lines fits this rendition
almost perfectly. The only small accommodation one has to make is to pronounce the
first word (‘Dearer’) on two, rather than three, notes. The second phrase (‘Than one …
well’) is longer by one syllable which allows the voice to come back to B. The psaltery
had two adjacent strings corresponding to the same note an octave apart which would
have been struck together. The sustained C of the notation would actually be played as

450
Op. cit., p. 23.

256
two C’s, one lower than the other.
451
The voice could then be used to glide from one to
the other over the neatly corresponding number of syllables.
452
Alternatively, Farr could
have adopted strategy (2) where the voice speaks the lines over the same note with the
slightest modulations.
453
It is hard to imagine how that would have been done, but one of
the most trustworthy eyewitnesses claims that she was doing precisely this at certain
points. Farr herself included his description in her primer.
454

Curiously, we have two extant scores of the same poem, one done by Dolmetsch, the
other by Florence Farr. The differences between the two scores are instructive.
Dolmetsch: Farr:
C C C C C D D B C D B
I went out to the hazel wood, I went out to the hazel wood,
B A A C C B B D B A C B D
Because a fire was in my head, Because a fire was in my head,
C C C C C D D B D C D B
And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And cut and peeled a hazel-wand,
B A A C C B B D B A C B D
And hooked a berry to a thread; And hooked a berry to a thread.

451
‘They[the strings] are arranged in couples sounding a note and its octave. By this means, Mr. Dolmetsch,
the inventor, secured a roundness and mystery of sound which single strings could never produce.’ (Op. cit.,
p. 10)

452
What I am suggesting here is of course speculative. One point that should be stressed is that Farr, as she
herself avers, would have spoken, not sung, this C scale. It takes a lot of effort to avoid the tempration of
making these two lines sound like an operatic warm-up exercise.

453
A third alternative (3) would be to counterpoint the sustained C. Farr admits to doing that occasionally
(see The Music of Speech, p. 11).

454
Professor C. H. Herford, Litt. Doctor (Professor of English Literature and Language at Manchester
University) wrote about the new Art on May 9
th
in the Manchester Guardian: ‘The result might be
described as a subtly modulated monotone – the monotone which in the hands of a great artist can often
thrill us with a more potent magic than all the bright play of contrasts.’ (Cited in The Мusic of Speech, p. 5)

257
D D
And when white moths were on the wing And when white moths were on the wing
D D
And moth-like stars were flickering out, And moth-like stars were flickering out,
C D D B B A A C C D B A C
I dropped the berry in a stream, I dropped the berry in a stream
C D D B B A A C C D B A C
and caught a little silver trout.
455
And caught a little silver trout.
456

The only difference in the notation is Farr’s D:C transition for ‘And cut’ in place of

Dolmetsch’s single sustained C. The fact that Farr’s notation has fewer notes does not
really constitute a difference. She was wont to write notes only in places where there was
a transition.
457
What is more interesting is the way in which Farr divides the poem. The
first four lines are to be ‘Lilted’; the next two lines are ‘Spoken’; the four lines after that
are again ‘Lilted’; and so on till the end of the poem. The divisions between lilted and
spoken lines do not coincide with the stanzas so that some stanzas are entirely lilted,
others only spoken, while the remaining stanzas are a hybrid between spoken and lilted.
The score indicates two stanzas of each type. The spoken lines have only one sustained
note (which suggests the possibility for modulation), while the lilted lines are the ones
with the many notes (which suggests that to lilt and to speak with modulation are two
different things).

455
‘Speaking to the Psaltery’, op. cit., p. 23.

456
Collected Letters, Vol. 3, p. 365.

457
She write in a note to her scores published in The Music of Speech, ‘For the sake of simplicity I have
neither indicated occasional repetitions of the same note nor changes of key. F. F.’ (op. cit., p. 26)
Dolmetsch’s notation has more notes probably because Yeats was to use it (it is extremely diffcult to keep
the voice for a long time on one sustained note if one does not have a prop of some kind).
258
Depending on whose delivery we are talking about, the score could be considered as
belonging either to the intermediary category – i.e. a more or less “musically” motivated
score – or to the category (a) where the speaking voice has pre-eminence and where there
is, strictly speaking, no “composition” involved. In Yeats’s case, we are probably talking
about delivery of the intermediary kind while in Farr’s case, we probably have a voice
more independent of the notes. In this sense, Yeats’s delivery was more like speaking to
notes while Farr’s was speaking over notes. The “music” was most probably composed
by Dolmetsch and Farr with Yeats present. But is is significant to note that what mattered
was what one did with the notes, not so much what the notation in itself looked like. We
see in Farr the attempt to own the notation and to deemphasize the music in it. In other
words, no matter what notes she was using, she was always striving for a pure catergory
(a) delivery during the ‘Spoken’ part of her performance.
458
In this connection, it is
significant that Dolmetsch’s scores have a time signature (e.g. 4/4 or 6/8) – something
which Farr’s scores entirely lack. Dolmetsch must have tried to fit the whole delivery into
the framework of the folk song. Thus, the song of Angus was to be spoken in a 4/4 time.
The musical score for it which was appended to Yeats’s essay ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’
divides the poem not into lines but into musical bars with each spoken syllable
corresponding to a note with a specific value (mostly eighth notes). The first two lines of
the poem as they are given in Dolmetsch’s score read as follows:

458
The sections indicated as ‘Lilted’ in Farr’s score could be seen as one of two things: an entitely different
type of delivery (probably akin to sing-song) or a more ergonomic type of category (a) with more notes and
therefore more explicit changes of pitch as opposed to subtle modulations. I am inclined to believe that the
lilt could be either one or the other thing, depending on the occasion, but in the case of this particular score,
the lilt is a different type of delivery altogether – a type which will remain a mystery.
259
ו Ǣ ך ך ך ך ך ך ך ( ) ו Ǣ ך ך ך ך ך ך ך ( ) Ǣ
I went out to the hazel wood, Be-cause a fire was in my head,
459

Yeats could not have been entirely happy with the 4/4 signature, and the pauses
introduced at the end each bar may have been Dolmetsch’s way of accommodating to
Yeats’s sense of rhythm. If we read the poem following this time signature, the result is a
stiff metronomic delivery which is the usual result when poems are “fitted” to either an
existing musical time signature or a metrical foot (as is the case in literary analysis). In
both cases, the fitted lines are far from the spirit of Yeats’s verse. We should conclude
that Dolmetsch, in his desire to come up with a finished “musical” product, provided a
cetain number of scores which Yeats and Farr departed from, each in his or her own way,
while keeping the scores as an advertisement of the new method which was to gain
popularity.
Quarrelsome domain: Yeats among modern musicians
The folk performer continued to be a model for Yeats as late as his BBC broadcasts.
These recordings feature a variety of poems but the majority are either on folk themes or
are deliberately traced back to the folk sources which served as their inspiration. Yeats
reads his poems ‘with great emphasis upon their rhythm’
460
. The ‘Fiddler of Dooney’ is
easily scanned according to the typical Irish folksy triplets. (e.g. ‘When I play on my
fiddle in Dooney [↑ta:ta: ↓Ta–Ta–Ta(3) ↓Ta–Ta–Ta(3) ↓Ta– : ta:] / Folk dance like a
wave of the sea [↑ta: ↓Ta–Ta–Ta(3) ↓Ta–Ta–Ta(3) ↓TA ] / My cousin is priest in

459
Op. cit., p. 23. The double vertical lines represent the end of a bar.

460
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol X. Later Articles and Reviews, p. 224.

260
Kilvarnet [↑ta: ↓Ta–Ta–Ta(3) ↓Ta–Ta–Ta(3) ↓Ta– : ta:] / My brother in
Mocharabuiee’ [↑ta: ↓Ta–Ta–Ta(3) ↓Ta–Ta–Ta(3) ↓TA ]. The slight variations on the
four-beat pattern are delightful. The speaker of the poem himself claims, ‘I had read in
my book of songs’.
When Yeats points to his own performative strategies, he lets his radio audience know
that folk performers used these strategies first. For instance, he starts the program ‘In the
Poet’s Pub’ (a title which explicitly stakes out a performative clearing as it attempts to
recreate a vernacular setting) by invoking folk singers ‘all over the world’ who ‘have
tricks to break the monotony’. Indeed the whole dramatic movement in Ireland is said to
have started with folk songs. ‘The songs came first’, and then the literary movement
began.
461
Since this is the case, ‘Should not the speakers learn from the [folk] singers?’
462

Learn what?! Yeats’s BBC broadcasts cast some light on how poetry is to be performed.
In all, Yeats made eight recordings between 1931 and 1937, most of which include
folkish poems or plays (especially The Land of Heart’s Desire). As Jeremy Silver has
pointed out, Yeats took a keen interest in having his work performed on the radio, a
medium which offered access to a broader audience relative to television.
463
Yeats’s

461
‘The Irish Literary Movement’, ibid., p. 254.

462
Ibid., p. 266.

463
Cf. ‘W. B. Yeats and the BBC: a Reassessment’ in Yeats Annual, No. 5, ed. by Warwick Gould, pp 181
ff. A 1939 recording of Ezra Pound reading to the accompaniment of a base-drum suggests that Yeats’s
influence was not limited to his reading his own work. Yeats’s method usually involves elongated vowel
sounds, rising intonations, and a special attention to rhythm. George Barnes, speaking of his collaborative
work with Yeats for the radio in 1936, explains: ‘He wanted to experiment with the use of the drum or
other musical instrument between stanzas or between poems, but never behind the voice, in order to
heighten the intensity of the rhythm and he also wished to try out unaccompanied singing of a refrain.’
261
specifications as to the “musical” content of the performances shows a considerable
thinning out of the accompanying element as compared to his views some twenty years
before. Music is now not only a gap-filling connector which must never distract the
attention from the spoken word. At the same time, the accompaniment became a lot more
experimental. Barnes recalls Yeats’s ideas for two experimental programs featuring
poetry reading by Yeats himself:
The musical instruments” he went on, “used for poems sung or spoken ‘at the
Village Inn’ should be what one might naturally find there – whistle, concertina,
drum. BBC Orchestra rejected throughout for both programmes and all forms of
chamber music. The musical instrument for ‘In the Poet’s Garden’ should be a
fiddle or viola, this one instrument should be sufficient. There must never be an
accompaniment, and no words must be spoken through music, though a pause
may sometimes be marked by a few low musical notes. They must never be loud
enough to shift the attention of the ear. After a song the gap between that and the
next item can be filled up by repetition of the air on the musical instrument. The
difficulty is in the case of the spoken recitations; where a few low notes have
marked a pause, these might lead up to the air which follows the recitation.
464

The difficulty in working with Yeats was, according to George Barnes, mostly due to
the fact that while Yeats had no ear for music, he had an extraordinarily sensitive feeling
for the sound of speech.
465
The exact nuanced effects he desired was difficult to

(Silver, Jeremy, ‘George Barnes’s “W. B. Yeats and Broadcasting” 1940’, in Yeats Annual, No. 5, pp 189
ff).

464
Silver, Jeremy, ‘George Barnes’s “W. B. Yeats and Broadcasting” 1940’, in Yeats Annual, No. 5, p 190.
Some of Yeats’s ‘poet’s tricks’ seem a little bizarre. For instance, he ‘made Clinton-Baddeley read “Three
Jolly Farmers” as patter and gave him an excellent imitation of the patter actors which Yeats had heard and
admired in his youth. He also made use of the bones with great effect as an accompaniment to Higgins’
“Songs for the Clatter Bones”.’ In a letter to Barnes, Yeats writes: ‘I got Stephenson while singing “Come
all old Parnellites” to clap his hands in time to the music after every verse and Higgins added people in the
wings clapped their hands. It was very stirring – on the wireless it was a schoolboy knocking with the end
of a penknife or a spoon.’ (Ibid., p. 191)

465
Barnes includes a ‘characteristic’ 1937 letter by Yeats: ‘I shall attend what rehearsals you ask me to, but
it is quite plain that all I can do is choose the poems and make certain general suggestions. You must take
262
communicate to professional musicians or speakers not least because Yeats’s own voice
(‘an instrument inadequate’) was unable to reproduce them. Some of the effects Barnes
mentions include subtle difference of stress (e.g. in the twice repeated line “Seventy years
have I lived”), rhythm (e.g. “and showed her hills green”), tension (as in “I came on a
great house in the middle of the night”), wonderful refrains which Yeats made Margot
Ruddock sing and which he himself ‘longed to sing’ (e.g. “The Little fox, he murmured,
oh, what of the world’s bane” or “O what of that, oh what of that, what is there left to
say”).
466

***

Yeats’s ‘great project’ ‘to unite literature and music’
467
ended in acrimony and
disenchantment. But some of Yeats’s ideas still manage to crystallize despite the patina
of mystery and disillusion. The main problem was that Yeats could not explain to Dulac
exactly what a unity of music and verse should look like. Yeats gave Dulac what he
thought of as being precise specifications. Unfortunately, the message was lost in
transition, even though Dulac thought he followed Yeats’s instructions to the letter.
Yeats intended one of the BBC broadcasts as a mock performance. Two speakers
would act as if they disagreed on major points; at the end of the heated debate they would
pause and one of them would say, while still on air but pretending that he did not realize

responsibility. Possibly all that I think noble and poignant in speech is impossible. Certainly I have no
knowledge of what is possible. Perhaps my old bundle of poet’s tricks is useless.’ (Ibid., p. 191)

466
Ibid, p. 193.

467
Yeats, W. B., Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, Oxford University Press, 1940, p.
32.
263
this, that he hoped the radio audience did not hear the bad language. What was conceived
in good jest ended with Yeats publicly disclaiming his share in the making of Dulac’s
musical accompaniment for the broadcasts. Apparently Dulac was too much of an
organised professional and could not be brought to understand Yeats’s ideas indebted as
they were to a vision of performance as a folkloric act.
The quarrels between Yeats and Dulac took place in June and July 1937. According to
Wayne McKenna, W. J. Turner, who was on Yeats’s side in this dispute, and therefore in
disagreement with Dulac, only managed to compound the difficulties in achieving a
unified vision among the collaborators. Turner himself vigorously opposed Dulac on
fundamental issues ‘and so made virtually impossible Dulac’s attempts at altering Yeats’s
conviction.’
468

The main bone of contention was whether the musical component of the word-music
unity should be fixed or not. Dulac thought that musical accompaniment, in the case of a
song, was ‘one of the means of fixing the modal character.’
469
‘Any new form of intoning,
chanting or singing must have a fixed new musical basis.’ However, by this time Yeats
had rejected the notion of accompaniment altogether because ‘where the words are the
object an accompaniment can but distract the attention, and because the musician who
claims to translate the emotion of the poet into another vehicle is a liar.’ Turner,
responding to Dulac, claimed, with Yeats, that instrumental accompaniment did not allow

468
McKenna, Wayne, ‘W. B. Yeats, W. J. Turner and Edmund Dulac: The Broadsides and Poetry
Broadcasts’ in Yeats Annual 8, p. 226.

469
Ibid., p. 226.

264
the singer the freedom needed to express deep emotion. He voiced his dissatisfaction with
the way modern musicians ‘have generally falsified [old folksongs] by fitting them to the
procrustean bed of the diatonic scale and given them a keyboard accompaniment.’
470
A
return to a more ‘natural expression’ was needed. ‘The perfect marriage between words
and music comes … when words and music fit together in a pure melodic and rhythmic
line like the old folk-songs which were chiefly sung without instrumental
accompaniment’. Turner seconded Yeats’s view of the Irish folk tradition, deploring the
modern ‘intellectualism’ vis-a-vis which the Broadsides came as a‘refreshment’.
471

A smaller point of disagreement concerns the exactness of intonation. Dulac insisted on
having a professional singer since only he/she could avoid falling into ‘the trap of the
tonal drift.’ Opposing this view, Yeats, as Turner stressed, ‘loved … the melodic
directness of folk-song in which words combine to make one impression, and it was the
expression that mattered,’ not the achievement of an exact pitch. A professional musician,
argued Turner, ‘is hurt into frenzy by a singer being out of tune. Not all good musicians
have absolute pitch, but they are all extremely sensitive to intonation, whereas Yeats
would not have known whether a singer was in tune or not.’ However, what Yeats
‘would have known infallibly in the case of a folk-song was whether it was well or ill
sung from his point of view, which, as I have said, was that of expression, not
intonation.’ The folk-singer could go flat or sharp as emotion required since his musical

470
The New Statesman, July 24, 1937, p. 146; reprinted in Hobby, Diana, William Butler Yeats and
Edmund Dulac. A Correspondence: 1916-1938, PhD thesis, Rice University: Houston, 1981, pp 252-4.

471
‘W. B. Yeats, W. J. Turner and Edmund Dulac’, p. 227.

265
feeling sprang from a deeper source than can be transcribed in a modern notation. To
exploit the resources of the folk tradition in Ireland, one had to rely not on the
mathematician’s method but on ‘the imagination of love in sound.’
472

The pressure was too much for Dulac to handle as he tried his best to explain himself.
‘Western music has become an organized affair with a separate system of expression’,
Dulac emphasized. ‘It is absurd to expect these two [i.e. ancient and folk poetry on the
one hand, and Western music on the other] to work together satisfactorily as it is to
expect two successful partners, who have broken their association in order to set up rival
establishments, to help each other.’
473

If one is to revive the association it is the music that must give way. It must …
be an accompaniment pure and simple and at no time, even in songs, must the
melodic line assume a quality of its own that would necessitate the use of more
than a few notes. That is what I humbly tried to do and that you [Yeats] mistook
for organized music. My object was to dissociate you and your poems from
amateurish efforts at the same kind of thing, to substitute some sort of efficiency
for inefficient improvisation.
474

Dulac goes on to offer some ‘rough ideas’. For starters, poetry should be divided in its
appropriate categories.
1) Poetry dealing with philosophical, metaphysical and other subjects of a non-
lyrical nature. This kind of poetry should simply be recited. ‘Rhythmical
emphasis would here replace music.’

472
Ibid., pp 229-31.

473
Ibid., p. 232.

474
Ibid., pp 232-3.

266
2) ‘Unaccompanied poetry that can be intoned. (Find new un-parsonic method of
intonation.) Semi-lyrical poems, plays on symbolical or non-modern subjects.’
3) ‘Accompanied poetry that can be chanted: story-telling, lyrical poetry, fragments
in some of the other plays.
4) There is finally song, ‘which would, of course, be written with a melodic setting
in view.’ ‘One could even establish modes corresponding to variations of the
above: set modes that could only be used for certain purposes, certain moods.’
475

Modernist Balladry
The last category, poetry written with music in mind, would prove to be the model
Yeats used for the poems he composed as a contribution to the Cuala Press broadsides,
published in the 1930s, of which he was the chief editor. These “ballads” were Yeats’s
last attempt to gain popularity, as he genuinely thought that within a generation or two
those broadsides would become part of mainstream culture. Not all broadsides were Irish
since other contributors had helped to make a mixed collection of both Irish and English
songs. It apprears that the music for Yeats’s broadsides had to be Irish folk music. This
was of course a requitement of the topics which Yeats engaged in his poems. Yeats
conceived of his own contribution to the broadside collection as a final return to the Irish
ballad form. It was because Irish poets had a living folk tradition on which to fall back
that they could rest in the confidence that their own verse would be taken up by the
common people.

475
Ibid., p. 233.
267
Brian Devine summarizes Yeats’s indebtedness to the Irish ballad tradition:
Apart from hearing the ordinary people singing ballads, as well as Hyde’s and
others’ collection of songs, and Pearse’s translations in various journals, there
was the work of that earlier patriot, Davis, and many other ballad makers from
whom Yeats learned a lot – not least hos partiality for the eight-line stanza form
which would be useful to his rhyming schemes. These ballads were also capable
of providing semantic as well as prosodic and structural inspiration.
476

For Yeats, a true literary tradition based on the ballad was possible only if the poet and
the people ‘have one heart’.
477
Even when the ballad tradition was being perpetuated by
invention on the part of contemporary literati (that is when the ballads no longer had their
origin in the oral Gaelic culture), this “invented” branch of the ballad tradition could still
reproduce the quality of simplicity and spontaneousness found in the Gaelic originals. It
is instructive to note in this context that the Young Ireland movement could not, Yeats
claimed, entirely reproduce the true sprit of the Gaelic originals. The political balladry
they had produced was only an adulteration, an inexact and artificial translation.
478
As
Denis Zimmermann explains, Yeats
soon distinguished between what was called “popular poetry” – in particular the
rhetorics and worn abstractions of The Spirit of the Nation – coming from the
middle class, not from the people, and the much better poetry full of mystery and
energy of the unlettered, who had behind them generations of poetical life.
479

476
Devine, Brian, Yeats, the Master of Sound. An investigation of the technical and aural achievements of
William Butler Yeats, Colin Smythe Ltd: Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, 2006, p. 112.

477
See ‘Popular Ballad Poetry in Ireland’, cited in Meir, Colin, The Ballads and Songs of W. B. Yeats. The
Anglo-Irish Heritage in Subject and Style, Barnes & Noble: New York, 1974, p. 8.

478
The only exception was Mangan who was extreme just as the folk tradition was extreme (e.g. when his
poetry was grim, it was really grim).

479
Zimmermann, Georges Denis, Songs of Irish Rebellion: Political Street Ballads and Rebel Songs, 1870
– 1900, Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2002, p. 83.
268
Yeats’s early ballad poems were attempts to come back to the original simplicity of the
Irish tradition while trying to do away with the rhetoric of the Young Irelanders. Poems
like ‘The Ballad of Father O’Hart’ rely on simple rhythms and rhyming patterns and are
clearly an imitation of the lilting measures and sing-song typical of the ballad tradition.
When we get to ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, the kind of personal contemplative poem
which is in a way the opposite of the ballad, we hear another type of music. Yeats himself
points to ‘Innisfree’ as an example of his beginning to ‘loosen rhythm as an escape from
rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings.’ This was also his ‘first
lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music.’ This preoccupation with his ‘own
music’ would continue well into Yeats’s last poetic productions in the 1930s when he,
curiously, returned to the ballad form. Is there a way in which Yeats’s own music and the
lilting measures of the ballad can be combined into one whole? To answer this question,
we must examine Yeats’s late ballads from a musical angle. But before that, we must
establish, if only tentatively, what exactly Yeats meant by music in poetic language.
Given Yeats’s lifelong emphasis on what he called passionate syntax, it is logical to
privilege, as do most scholars, the rhythmic make-up of Yeats’s poetry in a discussion of
the music of poetic speech. As we saw from the analysis of his method of speaking verse
to notes, Yeats himself claimed that rhythm was at the very center of his practical
experimentation. Following such clues, Colin Meir, among others, seems to think that
music in Yeats’s poetry is mostly stress patterns. Thus he compares ‘Innisfree’ with
Ferguson’s ‘The Fair Hills of Ireland’ claiming that Yeats was not entirely correct to state
269
that ‘Innisfree’ was his own music but was actually a kind of borrowing from elsewhere.
The lines Meir cites include:
There is honey in the trees where her misty vales
expand,
And her forest paths in summer are by falling waters
fanned;
There is dew at high noontide there, and springs i’ the
Yellow sand,
On the fair hills of holy Ireland.

Meir is not wrong to claim that‘[t]he rhythms and stresses of this translation are very
close to those of Yeats’s poem; so also is the language usage…’
480
It is true that the word
‘there’ is key for both poets and that the phrase ‘There is dew at high noontide there’ is
strikingly similar to the tonal patterns of Yeats’s poem. But that is because the translation
is in prose – and ‘Innisfree’ is a remarkable prose-like lyric hybrid. Almost anything in
prose that has this narration-like tone, but which is poetry, can be read with the typical
Yeatsean elongated chant-like drone as heard in his own reading of it much later for the
BBC, where the task Yeats set himself was precisely to try and make his own music out
of the words. Hence, if we decice to hear Yeats’s own cadences and tonal peculiarities,
we can make Ferguson’s line sound like a line taken from ‘The Lake Isle’.
To delve a little deeper into this issue, we should consider a statement by John
Masefield who shares a valuable reminiscence of one of those Woburn Monday nights on
which Yeats played host. The method seems to have been to mark beats and dwell on
vowels. This jives in remarkably well with the BBC recording we have.
481
Yeats’s music

480
The Ballads and Songs of W. B. Yeats, p. 16.

481
This recording is to be found in the BBC archives; an excerpt of it can be accessed on Youtube.
270
seems to have consisted in dwelling on beats (something which Meir himself points to)
and on elongated (chanted) vowels. The important thing to note is that what Yeats meant
by ‘music’ was something over and above stress patterns; something that sounded like a
special kind of poetry, a hybrid delivery almost like epic but more contemplative –
something that sounded like a chanted narration. Also, as the BBC recording shows, the
intonation (particularly the rising twists at the end of each phrase) is an essential part of
the ‘music’ and contributes to the sense of a chant-like delivery. Now, if we take this
music directly from the BBC recording and superimpose it on the lines Meir cites, we see
a remarkable aptness of the intonation to the words. This is because Yeats was looking to
find a method that would be applicable to reading personal/contemplative lyric in general.
Comparison to a ballad which could have been a source for Yeats’s Innisfree poem
allows us to judge exactly how close or far he is from the rhythms of the ballad tradition.
The following are the opening two stanzas of a poem taken from Katherine Tynan’s
Ballads and Lyrics (1891).
TO INISHKEA
I will arise and go to Inishkea,
Where many a one will weep for me
The bravest boy that sailed the sea
From Blacksod Bay to Killery.

I’ll dress my boat in sails of black,
The widow’s cloak I shall not lack,
I’ll set my face and ne’er turn back
Upon the way to Inishkea.
482

482
Tynan, Katherine, Ballads and Lyrics, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner and Co: London, 1891, pp 60-1.

271

It is quite clear even from a cursory comparison between this poem and Yeats’s
‘Innisfree’ that he saw seeking deliberately to loosen the traditional rhythm. Tynan’s
Ballad-like poem is quite schematic, the lines seem to have been designed to fit the
rhyme as well as the repetitive groove of the poem. While in principle it would not be
impossible to read the ballad cited above with the intonation and vocalic emphasis of the
BBC recordings, such a reading will not do justice to it, nor will that particular poem
allow Yeats’s method to come into its own.
Before I leave the question of rhythm in order to focus on the melodic aspect of music
and its role (which includes, but is not confined, to its influence on rhythm) for poetry, I
want to suggest that Yeats knew how to organize the rhythm of a poem according to an
acoustic internal editor – that is to say, he would compose based on how he wanted a
poem heard. This might seem like a trivial observation, had it not been for the fact that it
is precisely at this stage that folk music gets involved – and as we know, folk song is a
rather prickly rose, not easy to appropriate or hear. A curious passage in Essays and
Introductions offers a clue about the difference between stresses and beats. It is one thing
to say (as did Masefield) that a reader dwells on beats and quite another thing to say (as
does Meir) that he follows stress patterns. I do not wish to imply that stresses cannot be
beats, but rather that beats determined stresses, that to talk of beats is to go deeper into
the issue. The following passage is also instructive insofar as Yeats describes not so
much poetic lines as such but the methods of speaking them:
If I repeat the first line of Paradise Lost so as to emphasize its five feet I am
among the folk singers – ‘Of mán’s first dísobédience ánd the frúit’, but speak it
272
as I should I cross it with another emphasis, that of passionate prose – ‘Of mán’s
fírst disobédience and the frúit’ … the folk song is still here, but a ghostly voice,
an unvariable possibility, an unconscious norm. What moves me and my hearer
is a vivid speech that has no laws except that it must not exorcise the ghostly
voice. I am awake and asleep, at my moment of revelation, self-possessed in
self-surrender; there is no rhyme, no echo of the beaten drum, the dancing foot,
that would overset my balance.
483

What is so folksy about the first version, with its ‘five feet’? It is probably the fact that
the feet (Yeats does not call them stresses) are irregular – that is they are long and short –
like they are in a lot of folk music. So it appears that scansion could be based on folk
music as opposed to things like iambs and dactyls:
ta-TAaaa- of MAN’sfirst
TA-TA DISoBEDience
TA-TA ANDtheFRUit

In all likelihood, it is the long foot, followed by two groups of two short feet each, that
merits the invocation of the folk singer.
484

483
Essays and Introductions, cited in Meir, pp 112-3.

484
If one gets stuck in this groove repeatedly, the temptation arises to want to create a regularity which
gives the following phrase: TA-TA (where both MAN and FIRst are stressed) ~ TA-TA ~ TA-TA. The
second version (Yeats’s own music, one might say) starts with this tempting first TA-TA since it places a
stress on FIRst. As soon as we get to ‘disoBEDience’ the regularity gets disrupted since the ‘dis’ of
disobedience is no longer stressed. The second version becomes:

ofMAN’sFIRst
disoBEDience
andtheFRuit

The effect is similar but it is distributed differently: a short and a long foot come in quick succession
(ofMAN’sFIRstdiso) followed by another long foot (BEDienceandthe) and a final, apparently very
emphatically stressed, long foot (FRUitfollowedbyasilence). The whole thing, especially the silence which
comes in the long foot initiated by FRUit, appeats to be a nice set up for ‘SINGmuse’. Also, because the
second version has three long feet together (FIRstdisoBEDienceandtheFRUit), an incantatory quality is
introduced into the speech; one can almost hear a speaker elongating the stressed vowels as the voice
lingers on the downbeat. I should note here that the inirial ‘of’ in ‘Of man’s first’ is treated here as a kind of
273
***
But music means more than rhythm
485
, and Yeats’s Broadside ballads prove that.
Without getting into any technical discussion about the distinction between folk
ballads
486
and popular street ballads, I want to examine the ways in which the music
interacts with the words in these ballads which Yeats published together with Dorothy
Wellesley. ‘In the 1930s’, writes Georges Zimmermann, ‘Yeats was one of the most
illustrious and unexpected recruits for Irish ballad-writing. His main reason for turning to
song and for publishing broadsides was the desire to get back to simplicity in
rediscovering “the folk lilt”.’
487
This is how Yeats described his project to Dorothy
Wellesley, who was an important collaborator, when he was trying to get her to help him
recruit W. J. Turner:
I may ask you to help a great project of mine by asking W. J. Turner down for a
night. But that depends on how he views my project. I shall get him in London.
Here the poet F. R. Higgins and I (his head is full of folk tunes) are publishing at
the Cuala Press a series of handpainted broadsides (2/6 each, edition limited to
350), in each a poem by a living Irish poet and a traditional ballad and the music
for each and a picture for each. We want to get new or queer verse into
circulation, and we shall succeed. The work of Irish poets, quite deliberately put
into circulation with its music thirty and more years ago, is now all over the
country. The Free State Army march to a tune called own by the Salley Garden
without knowing that the march was first published with words of mine, words
that are now folklore. Now my plan is to start a new set of 12 next Spring with

grace note in music (or what is also called an aspiration). Traditional scansion would have to explain this
away as an unrealized beat or as an unstressed syllable in a metrical foot (in this case an iamb).

485
It is significant that Yeats wanted to ‘loosen’ it. Thus rhythm also means drive or pulse (not merely
drumbeats) and is for this reason less strictly demarcated than is implied in scansion focusing on metrical
units. Yeats often stressed his interest in the organic rhythm, as opposed to the metrical rhythm, of poetry.

486
For this distinction, see Zimmerman’s chapter on Yeats, op. cit.

487
Op. cit., pp 83-4.

274
poems by English as well as Irish poets. I want to get one of Turner's strange
philosophical poems set, let us say, for the bamboo flute (now taught in English
schools) and I want Turner (who is a musical critic) to choose other poems and
tunes. I have various ways of getting poems sung here. I want to make another
attempt to unite literature and music.
488

A more specific purpose was to show that ‘even the poet who thinks himself ignorant of
music will sometimes write unconsciously to tunes.’
489
A precedent for this unity of
words and music was to be found in folk song as well as in ancient lyric. As the
introductory essay to the 1937 collection states, ‘did not Sappho and Pindar attempt it,
and even folk song begins somewhere?’ The whole point of the collaboration between
poets and musicians on this project was to reach ‘some right balance between sound and
word.’
490
The modern platform had done a major violence to poetry. Since the
seventeenth century, composers had paid no attention to the inner life of the poem when
they wanted to incorporate it into their music. Without attention to the syntax or
‘elaborate rhythm’ of poetry, musicians twist the shape of poetic speech according to the
requirements of the melodic line even when the internal rhythm of the poem clashes with
the rhythm of the music. As a result, ‘the well-made words’ of poets have been turn[ed]
into spittle.’ The preface to the 1937 Broadsides is a vehement defense of the music of
poetry which professional singers and composers had ignored – composers, because they

488
Yeats, W. B., Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, Oxford University Press, 1940,
p. 32.

489
Ibid., p. 35. For this collection published in 1935, Yeats’s chief collaborator was F.R. Higgins ‘who is a
fine folk musician.’ (Ibid., p. 35)

490
Yeats, W. B. ed., Broadsides. A Collection of New Irish and English Songs. 1937, The Cuala Press:
Dublin, 1937, Preface, n. p.

275
were only interested in their own musical idea, singers ‘because no mouth trained to the
modern scale can articulate poetry.’
491

In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, Yeats shares his view of what the modern musicians
should do to copy the ways of the folk composer: ‘[your poem] should [go with your
music] if your musician has, like the old folk musicians, thought of stress only and left
the rest to the singer.’
492
Yeats collaborated for the music of his poems with Dulac,
Higgins, and Art O’Murnaghan, and the result is, in all cases, a folk-like ‘tune’ where the
rhythm of the music is quite obviously fitted to the rhythm of the poem. To what extent
can we say that the music of Yeats’s poems is in unity with the words?
The music for ‘The Three Bushes’, in the March broadside (No 3), was written by
Edmund Dulac. It is a delightful folk tune in F major with a flattened seventh. (This
melodic line, in F major, is found in other ballads as well. See for instance the tune
excerpted by Denis Zimmerman which he designates as ‘Probably “Gráinne Mhaol”’. In
this highly hybrid tune, one of the melodic lines follows a very similar F major trajectory
somewhat against the grain of the dominant melody which is in G minor. In ‘Gráinne
Mhaol’, just like in ‘The Three Bushes’, there are two competing melodic strands.
493
)
The refrain is simple but can be very powerful if inflected in the right way. Here,
Yeats’s idea that the composer should only take care of the stess and leave everything
else to singer seems very apposite. In the refrain, which in its simplicity is both beguiling

491
Ibid., Preface, n. p.

492
Op. cit., p. 104.

493
See Songs of Irish Rebellion, p. 183, for the musical score of ‘Gráinne Mhaol’.

276
and easily misheard, the voice has a single line to repeat. It is made of two identical
segments ‘O my dear, O my dear’ with the corresponding identical musical phrases:
A
494
(16
th
) – B(16-th) – C for ‘O my’; C(8-th) – C(8-th) for ‘dear’ followed by only three
notes for the second ‘o my dear’ of the first segment: D (8-th) – F (8-th) – C (1/4). The
line so far seems rather straightforward (the single and double vertical lines represent a
beat and a bar respectively:
O-o my ǀ dear, ǀ O my ǀ dear ǀ
A~B
495
C C C D F C

(1) (2) (1) (2)
The dancy 2/4 lilt comes out strongly: ta: a: Ta- Ta-: ta ǀ Ta-: ta TA ǀ 496

The effect is wonderful, especially if one thinks of the liberties (what Yeats called ‘the
rest’) which the singer can take with the notes. I will suggest only two possible variations,
which are in line with the tradition of the ballad. 1) The singer would not feel constrained
to say each syllable of the verse in exactly the time designated by the notes. Thus, the to-
and-fro swaying motion of the verse’s lilt can be made to sound more or less emphatic.
For instance, the two C’s of ‘dear’ would be made up of two equal-length sung vowels.
The singer can feel free to linger on the first C while shortening the second one: e.g. O-o
my de-ar, O-o my deee-ar. The next time the singer can reverse the lengthening: О-о my
deee-ar, O-o my de-ar. 2) The characteristic high-pitched inflection of the singing voice

494
This is the middle A on the G clef; the B is the note immediately above the A, the C the next note up and
so on.

495
The wavy line represents a legato.

496
In both cases, I have represented ‘dear’ not as two equal in duration eighth notes but as an extended
eigthth and a sixteenth; it is natural to do that in singing. A further variation would be to do that only once
(e.g. for the second ‘dear’); an even further variation would be to do that once but at different positions
each time the refrain is sung (e.g. once on the first, the next time on the second ‘dear’).
277
which is typical of the Irish ballad: the place to do that would be the ‘my’. The voice
curves heavily and then, after reaching a very high pitch for a fraction of a moment, stops
abruptuly, and disappears in the oral cavity’s hidden attic. This typical vocal diacritic
which sounds somewhat like a resounding single drop falling into a body of liquid can be
achieved on the second ‘O’ as well:
O-o my deee-ar, O-o my١ de-ar
It is obvious that the ballad tradition was at the back of both Dulac and Yeats’s mind
when composing the words and the music for ‘The Three Bushes’. The simplicity of the
folk tune is deceptive. The flattened seventh (E-flat as opposed to the E natural normal
for the F scale) helps create another harmonic center: the C to which the melody
constantly gravitates. The F remains, of course, the main focal point but the C is its close
rival so that the bi-centered melody gravitates in turn toward one or the other center. The
refrain (O my dear, O my dear) chooses the rival focal point (the C) as its center which
creates a feeling of playfulness quite in line with the songful equanimity with which the
ballad tradition treats serious topics like death.
It is obvious, when looking at the rest of Yeats’s poems which he contributed to the
Broadsides, that the unity of music and words was perhaps the first item on the agenda of
the collaborators. In the case of ‘The Three Bushes’ (as well as ‘Come Gather Round Me
Parnellites’) where the music was proviced by Dulac, the collaboration was closer than
usual. They discussed this issue of unity regularly (and, as has already been demonstrated
in the previous section, their debates sometimes resulted in tension) and the verse seems
really to have benefited from that collaboration. Another great example in this respect is
278
the poem ‘The Curse of Cromwell’, and indeed all of Yeats’s broadsides. I will not get
into any more musical detail here. Suffice it to say that poems like ‘Come Gather Round
me’, ‘The Three Bushes’, ‘Colonel Martin’, etc., were specifically designed so as to
avoid repeating the error – committed by modern musicians against whom Yeats directed
such a vicious diatribe in the introduction to the 1937 collection of broadsides – of
disturbing the primordial fine balance between words and music which was still to be
found in folk song. Whether it was Dulac or Higgins who came up with traditional-
looking tunes, or it was Art O’Murnaghan
497
who arranged an already existing tune, the
idea of unity was driven by the desire to find the best form which would express an
almost objective sentiment and not so much a personal feeling – a form in which the
personal should be directed within the well-defined channels of the objective/traditional.
It is as if the objective sentiment was to be found in an ancient unity between music and
words which had been disrupted by the individualism of modern poetry. In a curious
passage relating a discussion with Yeats about music and words as well as about kinds of
poetry, William Rothenstein explains the turn to objectivity in Yeats’s later poetry:
… in future he [Yeats] would write ballads to be sung in the streets. Ballads set
to new tunes if musician would make them. For poetry should be sung to music
again, as it was by the Troubadours and the old Irish poets. In fact he had
already started such ballads… In talking of poetry Yeats said the upholders of
free verse claimed that its form was, without restriction, accommodated to the
matter. He took the opposite view: the essence of poetry is the outpouring of the
personal into a static form… although the form could of course be changed and
adapted. ‘I’m a traditionalist.’ He cited Byron’s ‘So we’ll go on more a roving’

497
O’Murnaghan arragned the music for Broadside No 10 (October), where Yeats’s ‘The Pilgrim’ appears.
The music for this poem is in a traditional E-flat major.

279
where he related his personal feeling, not only to traditional words, and metre,
but to an old quotation, and thus gives it ‘far more melancholy.
498

These new tunes were to be composed in imitation of folk songs. The more
traditional/authentic they sounded the better. Once, when Higgins had contributed with
such a ballad tune, Yeats praised him because of the fact that the tune was
indistinguishable from the actual folk ballad tradition. The broadside project as a whole
was based on the firm belief that the conservatism of the folk tradition (with its unity
between words and music) could be replicated in modern experiments. These new-
traditional products of oral culture would be taken up the people no doubt because the
static form in which the new songs were produced expresses a peculiar quality of the folk
tradition – its melancholy. The melancholy of traditional song consists in its own
awareness of its form. Like a guest keener invited to mourn a loss not his own, the
traditional singer borrows the objective sentiment but is able swiftly to identify with it
(this is the personal aspect). Jumping on this bandwagon, the modern poet could re-
embody the objective sentiment not least because of his identification with the tradition
expressed in his own melancholy for form.
But the unity of music and words has a further shade of meaning in the case of Yeats’s
poetry. So far, we have called attention to two possible dimensions of this unity:
(a) The collaboration between the poet (e.g. Yeats) and the musician (e.g. Dulac) where
the music is composed after the fact to fit the words. In the case of a lot of broadsides

498
Rothenstein, William, Since Fifty, Men and Memories, 1922 – 1938; recollections of William
Rothenstein, Faber and Faber: London, 1939, pp. 249-51. The poem ‘So we’ll go on more a roving’ was
perhaps suggested to Byron by the Scottsh song ‘The Jolly Beggar’. The traditional Irish band Planxty has
used it for a chorus in its recorded version of ‘The Jolly Beggar’ (see Youtube for a 1980 performance).
280
(those not written by Yeats), the music had to be ordered, as it were. In those cases, the
unity of music and words was not so consciously targeted as Yeats’s introduction to the
1937 collection implies.
(b) The collaboration between poet and musician which occurs, in a manner of
speaking, inside the head of the poet: i.e. when the poet “composes” the words with a
specific tune in mind. Yeats liked to claim that he wrote poetry in this way.
There is a third possibility (c): when the poem (or certain parts of it) seems to advertise
its status of a song. In some cases (c) and (b) may coincide, but for someone like Yeats,
to compose to a tune (b) did not necessarily mean that the poem should look like a
written-down song (c). In his later poetry, we find a lot of moments where the words
almost demand to be sung. Thus, a truly hybrid genre is achieved, and it is perhaps no
coincidence that it is in Yeats’s later poetry (at a time when he was coming back to the
ballad) that this kind of hyridity is most strongly in evidence. As Victor Clinton Baddeley
(who became one of Yeats’s best male reciters) has said in his record of Yeats’s theories
regarding the unity of music and words, some poems contained words which ‘are ideally
framed for singing and like the words of any other good song, they expect and await the
addition of music.’
499
Many examples of this “musical” quality
500
in Yeats’s later verse
could be adduced to demonstrate that, towards the end of his career, he comes back full
circle to the traditional ballad and the songfulness it brings to poetry. This is another

499
Baddeley, Victor Clinton, Words for Music, Cambridge University Press, 1941, p. 159.

500
Again, this quality does not necessarily imply a specific tune to which the poem is composed but a
general tunefulness which is evident in the poem.

281
instance of what Yeats – referring with the benefit of hind-sight to his earlier writing –
called ‘my own music’.
O what has made that sudden noise?
What on the threshold stands?
It never crossed the sea because
John Bull and the sea are friends;
But this is not the old sea
Nor this the old seashore.
What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea’s roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
501

***
Yeats’s debt to a folkloric vision of performance is evident from quite literally all of his
‘practical’ work. He did not stop to experiment with various ways of performing poetry,
and even though he participated in key debates among modernist circles (e.g. the Imagists)
concerning rhythm, poetic performance, the unity of music and speech, etc., his brush
with the new did not prevent him form remaining a ‘traditionalist’. But, as he himself
said in his American lectures, the tradition demanded new weapons if it was to win the
cultural war. These ‘new means’ constituted the desired goal of his experimentation.
Much has been said about the motifs and themes he borrowed from folklore. In this
chapter, I have tried to focus on folklore as performance. Few scholars have attempted to
do that, since to the literary critic, folklore means mostly a dead item to be picked up at
will, revamped, re-situated (to use Benson’s term) and graciously given a new lease on
life in a modern context. Far from being a mere rattle-bag of items, folklore served as a

501
See ‘The Ghost of Roger Casement’ in Last Poems, cited in Baddeley, p. 163.
282
model for poetic performance and even as a powerful mechanism driving a given culture.
In some sense, then, modernism itself can be seen as a stage in the ongoing lifecycle of
folklore. I want to further illustrate this point by adducing two more examples of poetic
modernism situating itself within a larger folkloric tradition. In the next chapter, I will
examine the poetry of García Lorca and the crucial role of flamenco for both the
construction of Lorca’s poetry and his performative aesthetics. Geo Milev’s work with
the Bulgarian folk song has attracted enough attention by literary critics. I want to take a
somewhat different tack; I will examine the crucial role in the construction of his poetic
voice of an entirely neglected urban folkloric genre: the football chant. No scholar has
ever attempted to treat the football chant either as a folkloric genre (this is a gap in the
science of folkloristics which has treated things like military chants, playground chants,
party poems fitted to pop tunes, etc.) or as in any way a maker and shaper of literariness.
This doubly neglected folkloric genre was nonetheless a model for the performance of
Geo Milev’s vocal folk in the poem ‘September’ and elsewhere.

283
Chapter three: Vernacularism

“Popularismo”: Federico García Lorca and vernacular aesthetics
The Lectures: Folklore as Aesthetic Theory
A) Lorca’s discovery of the hidden treasure of folklore:
B) The theory of the duende as vernacular theodicy
Flamenco Ole!
Lorca’s Poetic Juerga
Geo Milev and vernacular expression
Articles of poetic faith
There’s only one – the people
The vernacular logic of inverted syntax
The Edenic plural anon
The sound of it
The chanting tradition as collective memory
Space and the collective memory of the chant
Naming in the chanting tradition
‘September’: an audio-print experiment

To vernacularize oneself is to put on a self-effacing mask of minority. A poet with high
artistic ideals may call his or her poetry “little” or “simple”, for instance, and in this way
acknowledge a special debt to the creative energies hidden in neglected poetic genres. He
or she may embrace the popular as an unpopular – among high literati – way of enriching
his/her own expression. The very gesture of putting on the mask of vernacularity is itself,
like the vernacular, delphic, in the sense that it means more than it says. The implication
is always that less is more.
The vernacular is the unpopular/minor popular. Vernacular locations, like vernacular
masks, offer unexpected rewards. If a street in mid-city Los Angeles can be called
vernacular, it has to be Normandie which runs parallel to Vermont and takes you to USC
284
campus in a jiffy. It is not often taken by motorists who prefer its wider, more popular
neighbors on either side.
In a letter to Yeats, 12 December 1900, Standish O’Grady expressed his concern that
the ancient Irish myths were used inappropriately as material for literature. They had
become cheapened as authors had lowered themselves to the level of popular literature.
‘Frankly, & quite between ourselves, I don’t like at all the way you have been going on
now for a good many years. You cant help it, I suppose, having got down to the
crowds.’
502
Yeats himself yearned for popularity. In his later years, as part of a vernacular
posture, he often claimed simplicity for his poetry. The underlying assumption was
always that there are qualities possessed by some kinds of simple/popular poetry which
are hidden under the surface. In order for this secret to become open, one needed to get
beyond hasty judgments conditioned by the presupposition that poetic qualities are
necessarily instantiated in the best way in complex poetry. And yet, to a certain extent,
Yeats agreed with O’Grady that most popular poetry is deficient, that to live among the
crowd, in most instances, is to lower oneself. In his essay ‘What is Popular Poetry’, Yeats
claimed that Young Irelanders (with the exception of Mangan) were popular and that
because of this their verse was rhetorical and bad. They had become one with the crowd
but they were not one with the true spirit of the folk. This spirit was to be found only in
isolated pockets where traditions and simple ways of living still held sway. In a sense, the
Young Irelanders had not descended down enough. The real folklore of tradition, both
Yeats and O’Grady claimed, got warped and its essence killed when it became what one

502
Letters to W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1, ed. by Richard Finnerman, George Harper and William Murhpy,
Columbia University Press: New York, 1977, pp 76-7.
285
may call “pop folk”. While popular folklore is a conscious and cheap imitation, the
vernacular (which is in no sense perceived by popular culture as being a significant part
of that culture) is a carrier of crucial qualities which lend potency to (high) art. Unawares,
it thrives on, rarely stopping to rank its own prestige on the hierarchy of culture. It is in
this context that I wish to place the vernacularism of the two poets discussed in this
chapter. Vernacularism entails leapfrogging pop-folk in order to find a niche for oneself
among what is construed as genuine/original/hidden folklore.
Somewhere on the underside of the plane of the popular lies the vernacular. It always
remains popular and it may be for this reason that it is neglected and unlikely – until
someone unlocks the secret of its hidden energy – as a target for literary appropriation.
That job has already been done by its stealthy neighbor, the pop-folk. But literary
modernism does not always shun the vernacular. Instead, it sometimes thrives on the
vernacular’s qualities which include, among others, traditionality, simplicity, brevity,
fragmentedess, orality, oracularity, contextuality, minority, proximity, extremity.
Vernacular genres are ‘little’ in the sense of being both brief and unassuming. They
remain distant, positioned as they are right under the nose:
I have here a row of little blue-paper-poem books – a whole ballad literature as
foreign from all modern English ways as though it were of farthest Iceland and
not of neighbouring Ireland, and unknown in name even to most Anglo-Saxon
households.
503

They are oracular in the sense of being carriers of distilled/delphic meaning. A few
simple fragments often appear as if taken from a rich vault laden with hidden material.

503
Cf. Yeats’s essay ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’, in Early Articles and Reviews. Uncollected Articles
and Reviews Written between 1886 and 1990, ed. by John Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, Scribner:
New York, 2004, p. 93.
286
With each fragment, the unsaid is invoked and continues to hover over the explicitly said.
Sometimes, as in flamenco lyrics, the fragments make no sense together: heart-rending
cries of pain can be followed by insults to the neighbor or deadpan descriptions of the
day’s mundane vicissitudes. What is invoked by each fragment is a spectrum of sub-
genres each with its own tradition and its own mood.
Vernacular expression is extreme, excessive. As Kamau Braithwaite says in his lecture
on nation language, the printed word lawwwwd (for ‘lord’) is spoken, in vernacular
pronunciation, with the power of the Japanese motorbike S 90. Vernacular genres are
mostly spoken or sung and usually accompany some action. The act of performance
completes their meaning. In Yeats’s view, when they are taken from their oral context,
they become dead on the printed page.
504
Thus, when Irish ballads transmitted ‘from
mouth to mouth’ became material in the hands of the hedge schoolmasters, they were ‘far
inferior to mere peasant poetry.’
505

One wishes that they remained ‘mere’ at the same time as one is tempted to appropriate
them. Having looted the vernacular for its qualities, the modernist poet is faced by the
problem of how to make these qualities his or her own. What guarantees that the ‘simple
and spontaneous thing’ which ‘was this peasant poet-craft’
506
will lend simplicity and
spontaneity when it is transposed to a different medium? Can a poet appropriate these

504
This chapter attempts to revive some of the qualities of the vernacular by sounding them both on and off
the printed page.

505
Ibid., p. 96.

506
Ibid., p. 97.

287
decisive qualities and still remain modern? (Lorca, for instance, was adamant that the
traditional poetry of cante jondo should not be imitated by literati who had too much
grammar in them. A modern poet had to use modern means by which to translate the
vernacular substratum.)
507
The answer seems to lie in the appropriation of the
performative context of traditional poetry by stepping within the chain of the folkloric
tradition. To be in step with the tradition includes both the performance of its qualities
and their constant adaptation to modern settings. To simply imitate is to deny life to the
tradition which is ever ready to renew itself. A blind imitator is an anachronistic
antiquary. But if one is aware of the lifecycles of folkloric genres, one realizes that
change and innovation are welcome and that each enactment of folkloric materials is by
definition an addendum – more than a mere copy. Thus, the very notion of stepping onto
the folkloric chain turns the attention away from the copying of materials and ushers in
the haunting presence of the tradition of performance. It seems that there is a way for the
chain of transmission to avoid reaching a dead-end in the publishing house.
The problem is that, having passed through the printed page, the tradition gives birth to
cheap imitations. The only way to avoid this evil is return the poetry to the people while
insisting on one’s own modern means of performance. If the people are taken by this, the
modern poet has passed the test. If not, then one remains a solitary folkloric bird singing
in a wilderness.
An additional risk facing the writer wishing to appropriate vernacular materials is the
necessity to pick a small selection of instantiations of the tradition from a plethora of sub-

507
This was also Yeats’s view who, right after mentioning, in one of his American lectures, the modern
means of waging cultural warfare, went on to speak to musical notes (see chapter two).
288
genres. Whatever the writer does, he or she is by necessity narrowly selective. William
Allingham states this problem in connection with his own work in the Irish ballad
tradition. The writer ‘is to give it [the ballad] one form – the best according to his
judgment and feeling – in firm black and white…; the ballad itself is multiform, and even
shifting, vapourlike, as one examines it…’. Even when the utmost care is taken to
represent the shifty vernacular, the critic can prove it ‘a thing of nought’.
508
Both of the
modernists examined in this chapter took the risky vernacular path and constructed their
respective aesthetic/poetic voice based on things of naught.
“Popularismo”: Federico García Lorca and vernacular aesthetics
Between the years 1898 and 1936, referred to by many as the second golden age of
Spanish literature, the avant-gardist impulse often sought folklore as its accomplice in the
task of literary innovation. Andalusia, as a region, enjoyed a special status since a lot of
key artists came from there or claimed it as their place of choice. As Gabriela Genovese
has pointed out, ‘Andalusia and everything Andalusian was the material evoked and
summoned by the avant-garde poets’ who felt connected to the tradition of the romance
and to the tradition of popular poetry more generally. A crucial influence in this respect
was Menéndez Pidal who ‘converted into a paradigm the recuperation of popular
literature.
509

508
Cited in David Pierce’s biography of Yeats, Yeats’s Worlds. Ireland, England and the Poetic
Imagination, Yale University Press, 1995, pp 77-8.

509
‘Andalucia y lo andaluz constituyen el material evocado y convocado por los poetas vanguardistas … a
partir de su condicíon de españoles del sur y de la gran influencia que sobre ellos ejercía Menéndez Pidal,
convertido en paradigma de la recuperación de la literature popular.’ (Un Poeta de los Márgenes: Feretico
García Lorca, Editorial Martin: Argentina, 2005, p. 25)

289
In addition to being part of this artistic milieu, Lorca had some first-hand experience of
traditional song. Growing up in a rural area (Fuentevaqueros), he no doubt participated in
the village veladas – informal gatherings enlivened by song and story.
510
By the time he
was to help with the organization of the Cuncurso Nacional de Cante Jondo (which
involved searching for non-professional singers from Andalusia), Lorca had familiarized
himself with the words and music of the cante both from his own study and from his
alliance with Manuel de Falla who was himself something of an expert on the subject.
511

Lorca benefited from two traditions simultaneously: one was the living tradition of folk
song (he collected hundreds) still sung among the folk, the other was a longstanding
tradition within Spanish literature of literary appropriation of popular song; this literary
tradition went back as far as the golden age (Siglo de Oro) and even the Medieval period
and included canonized figures like Gil Vicente, Lope, Góngora and others
512
. In many
ways, the interest of the ‘98 generation in folklore was a conscious prolongation of the
efforts of the golden age and its work in the popular vein. Lorca’s own generation, for all
their disagreements with the Generation of 1898, continued this trend; however, this time
the folk materials were viewed as kith and kin with avant-gardism and literary
innovation.
513

510
Un Poeta de los Márgenes, p. 25.

511
De Falla had written an essay on cante jondo (‘Analysis de los elementos musicales del cante jondo’)
which Lorca invokes in his lecture delivered as part of the Concurso.

512
See Ramos-Gil, Carlos, Ecos Antiguos, Estructuras Nuevas y Mundo Primario de la Liric de Lorca,
Universidad Nacional del Sur: Bahia Blanca, 1967, p. 20.

513
The situation in Bulgaria during the modernist period was very similar. Folklore, and folk song in
particular, was co-opted as a spur to avant-gardist innovation. Geo Milev, for instance, insisted on the
290
Sandra Robertson describes the give-and-take existing in Spanish culture between the
popular and high art traditions. Focusing mostly on Rafael Alberti’s (1902 – 1999)
lecture ‘Lope de Vega y la poesia contemporanea’ (versions of which were delivered in
Berlin and Havana), Robertson explores the interchange between poesía popular and
poesía culto as a major mechanism driving Spanish literature. According to Alberti, this
back-and-forth movement between people and poet is possible only because the pueblo
was a ‘receptor of the products of the high art tradition.’
514
“Memoria popular” is also
“memoria en movimiento”
515
so that ‘the pueblo, in the act of appropriating the materials
from learned or exterior sources, transforms and enriches them, making them its own.’
Conversely, ‘the products of this process, subjected to the variations and enrichment of
the oral tradition, become the source for the learned poets.’ The “intercambio lírico entre
el pueblo y nosotros” (the lyric interchange between the people and us) was also relevant
for the work of Lorca whom Alberti includes in the list of contemporary poets working in
the popular mode. In fact Alberti presents himself and Lorca as two of the major players

expressive qualities of folk materials. He saw folklore as a natural ally to expressionist poetry. Icons Asleep
offers ample proof of that. The poem consists of six segments all of which refer (in an epigraph) to actual
songs from the folk tradition. Some segments work out key motifs found in the Bulgarian folk song (e.g.
the love between a woman and the zmey), others seem to distill the expressive qualities of folk song. The
link between folk forms and expressionism is also exemplified by the work of Anton Strashimirov (1872 –
1937) – particularly his expressionist novel Horo (lit. circle dance) – and Chavdar Mutafov (1889 – 1954),
with his Marionettes. Impressions (1920), which is a kind of graphic expressionist novel. The refraction of
folklore through the prism of philosophical or literary movements was one of the staples of Bulgarian
modernism. Folklore is aligned with absurdism, surrealism, existentialism, expressionism, and belated
symbolism; some of the key figures include: Peyo Yavorov (1878 – 1914), Teodor Trayanov (1882 – 1945),
Dimcho Debelyanov (1887 – 1916), Nikolai Liliev (1885 – 1960), Nikolai Marangozov (1900 – 1967),
Atanas Dalchev (1904 – 1978).

514
Robertson, Sandra, Lorca, Alberti, and the Theater of Popular Poetry, Peter Lang: New York, 1991, p. 9.

515
Citations from Alberti’s lecture in this paragraph are given in double quotes.

291
in the “canje de la poesía culta y la popular” (exchange between high and popular
literature).
516
However, this mutual give-and-take did not stop with appropriation of folk
sources by modernist poets:
The trajectory of Federico García into the future, which is also a palpitating
feeling of his own time, presages for his theater and poetry a long life in the ear
of the tradition which already repeats them [the theater and poetry], almost
anonymously, in village after little village and around public squares.
517

Alberti relates an incident in which he heard a street singer singing verses written by –
Alberti. He then expands the relevance of this anecdote to the history of Spanish
literature where Lorca is once again mentioned:
Like this copla of mine, many coplas, written by Manuel Machado, Federico
García Lorca and others, old and new, go their way, united now with their
anonymous companions, incorporated in the repertoire of the cantaores, leading
in this way their own vagrant existence.
518

516
Edwin Honig (García Lorca, New Directions Books: Norfolk, Connecticut, 1944, p. 30) makes a similar
point. Describing the hybridity of the Spanish literary tradition – a hybridity which it owes in no small
measure to its openness to folklore – Honig comments: ‘Contained within this ballad tradition is an
unusually rich amalgam of racial experience, an expression of the people’s peculiar genius to retrieve the
best elements from Spain’s many cultural inundations... It [Spanish literature] is constantly hovering over
the margin where the individual expression passes into the anonymous, where what seems the most
anonymous is actually the work of the most individual of artists.

517
‘La trayectoria de Federico García hacia el futuro, sintiéndose también palpitante de inquietude con su
tiempo, augura a su teatro y a sus poemas larga vida en los oídos tradicionales, que ya le repiten casi
anónimo, por aldeíllas y plazuelas.’ (Cited in Robertson, p. 10)

518
‘Como esta copla mía, muchas de Manuel Machado, Federico García Lorca y otros antíguos y actuales,
unidas ya a sus compañeros anónimos, andan, incorporados al repetorio de los cantaores, llevando así una
vida errante…’ (Lorca, Alberti, and the Theater., p. 10) The tradition of the copla, like many other
traditions of folk lyric is fragmentary, hybrid and difficult to pinpoint. Lyric items float in the air like
gossamer, and it is hard to say where they are coming from. In an actual song – which usually includes
more than one strophe – several such items congregate to form a flimsy unity. Following what logic these
items become combined, no one can tell with precision.

Masticando desengaños Chewing disappointment
Caminaban calle arriba. They walked up the street.
Ella, sola se sabía, She knew she was alone,
Él, atado come el reo; He was tied like a convicted offender;
Así pasando la vida. Spending their lives this way.

292

Lyrical oddments like this one por fandangos will at some point get united with two or three more of their
kind to form a “finished” unity. Sometimes the resulting product may even receive a title, as in this case the
final “poem” is called ‘Fandangos del Amor Pasajero’ where fandangos is the name of the flamenco sub-
genre. These free-floating “strophes” (for lack of a better word) can become disengaged and united with
other longer “poems” as occasion calls (sometimes individual lines may be imported). The result is a living
web of intertextuality awaiting its precipitation in the act of performance. This is the effect which Rafael
Calvo-Flores seeks in his edition of flamenco lyric. The method he chooses to unite the individual stanzas
(as he calls them) is the number of syllables. But thematic correspondence seems also to have played a part.
These two factors are key in the flamenco tradition as well.

Como la brisa del monte, Like a mountain breeeze
su rumbo de valle en valle, On its course from valley to valley;
a mi arbolito llegaste At my little tree you arrived
una mañana, sin rumbo; One morning, wandering;
con la brisa te marchste. With the breeze you went away.

Me decía ave de paso He called me a wandering bird
porque nunca me paraba. Becauase I never stayed long.
Llámame major solitario, Better yet, call me solitary,
peregrine del amor, A pilgrim of love,
nazareno en tu calvario. Penitent in your Calvary.

Masticando desengaños Chewing disappointment
Caminaban calle arriba. They walked up the street.
Ella, sola se sabía, She knew she was alone,
Él, atado come el reo; He was tied like a convicted offender;
Así pasando la vida. Spending their lives this way.

(Calvo-Flores, Rafael, Poemas Gitanos. Gypsy poems, English-Spanish Bilingual Edition, transl. José Luis
Vázquez Marruecos and Patricia Rokowski, illustrations by Emilio Peregrina, Granada, 2005, p. 47).
As Lorca said, commenting on this gossamer tradition, ‘‘Los verdaderos poemas del cante jondo no son
de nadie, están flotando en el viento.’ (Complete Works III, p. 208. The true cante jondo poems are
nobody’s, they are floating in the air. )
One of Lorca’s poems seems to be designed precisely with this open fragmentariness in mind. However,
this time one and the same floating motif gets pegged to three different situations.

La Lola Lola

Bajo el naranjo, lava Under the orange tree,
pañales de algodón. she washes cotton diapers.
Tiene verdes los ojos She has green eyes
Y violeta la voz. and a violet voice.

¡Ay, amor, Oh love,
Bajo el naranjo en flor! under the orange blossoms!

El agua de la acequia The stream water
iba llena de sol. flowed full of sun.
En el olivario A sparrow was singing
cantaba un garrión in the olive grove.

293

In its veneration of the popular tradition, the Generation of 1927 is, as Alberti sees it, a
direct inheritor of the legacy of the Spanish Renaissance:
Some of us Spanish poets today are intimately connected to Lope in our
continuation of that tradition which recreates the “popular”, which takes it in
order to return it in a reinvented form. He, together with Gil Vicente, let’s say,
are, at least in my opinion, the greatest masters in this trajectory. They gave it
the initial impetus; their powerful drive forward comes all the way to us, it
reaches us, catching us and flipping us over.
519

The continued relevance of the Siglo de Oro is rendered here as nothing less than
revolutionary potential (‘flipping us over’ or ‘overturning us’). Alberti’s Lorca, for his
own part, ‘grabbed’ traditional coplas and little romances sung by ‘servants in patios’ and
smuggled them into his own texts. With this move, Lorca is fully co-opted as a popular

¡Ay, amor, Oh love,
Bajo el naranjo en flor! under the orange blossoms!

Luego, cuando la Lola Later, when Lola
Gaste todo el jabón, used up all the soap,
vendrán los torerillos. the young toreros will come.

¡Ay, amor, Oh love,
Bajo el naranjo en flor! under the orange blossoms!
(Op. cit., pp 134-5)

Lorca experiments with all kinds of folk-style repetitions and refrains in his Poema del cante jondo,
delighting in the opportunity whnich the fragmentary logic of folk-lyric composition offers to the poet
wishing to appropriate it. Yeats’s poem about the long-legged fly seems to follow a similar logic of
composition where a refrain is fitted to three different situations. The playing off of the separate stanzas
against each other produces interesting meanings, and this is perhaps the ultimate logic of folk-song
compositions which use this method. But for this semantic richness to occur, the refrain must be a pithy,
delphic bit of speech. The importation of distilled speech into a poem sheds light on each of the
“variations” on the same theme. In the process, each situation/variation gets to carry more than one
meaning. In the end, the bits of delphic speech create a polyvocality which is typical of the folk song.

519
‘Algunos poetas españoles de ahora estamos ligados a Lope íntimamente, continuando esa tradición que
recrea lo ‘popular,’ que la toma, para devolverlo reinventado. Él y Gil Vicente, dijimos, son, a menos para
mí, los más grandes maestros en esta trayectoria. Ellos la impulsan: su embestida llega hasta nosotros, nos
alcanza, cogiéndonos, volteándonos.’ (Lorca, Alberti, and the Theater, p. 12)

294
poet who manages, like a lot of other Spanish masters, to step directly into the folkloric
chain of transmission.
520

The contemporary authors whom Alberti lists (Moreno Villa, Jorge Guillén, Pedro
Salinas, García Lorca, Fernando Villalón, Luis Cernuda, Emilio Prados, and Manuel
Altolaguirre) prolong the ‘double line’ (doble línea) started by the Generation of ’98 who
are now seen as the ‘fathers’ (Unanumo, Valle, Inclán), with Antonio Machado and Juan
Ramón Jiménez designated as ‘super-fathers’ in this tradition of appropriating the
popular. The modernismo of the fathers is linked to the experimentation of the new
generation, while the folklorism of both generations is seen as part of the very essence of
the respective literary movements.
521

In what amounts to a programmatic statement for the Generation of 1927, Alberti
envisages for folklore a restoration of the vital role it had played during the Renaissance
and modernismo. But this is not simply a tendency which Alberti observes in individual
authors. Modernism
522
(in its latest and most avant-garde phase) is here enframed within
the larger folkloric tradition whose life-cycle is once again passing through a phase of

520
‘¡Que contento estaría Lope con este hijo lopesco, semi gitano de Granada! Con su mismo desenfado,
arrebata la copla de la guitarra de los cantaores, romancillos de las criadas que cantan en los patios y los
intercala en su teatro y en sus poemas.’ (Ibid., p. 13)

521
Cf. Lorca, Alberti, and the Theater, pp 14-5.

522
Most authors speak of two phases in Spanish modernism: the Generation of 1898 and the Genration of
1927. Some see them as opposed to one another, with the later authors rebelling against their predecessors.
What is known as modernismo in Spanish literature is this earlier phase, which, as far as the younger
authors were concerned, had to be subverted. Spanish literature is peculiar in this respect, since it was not
until the later phase (the Generation of 1927) that Spanish authors became included in the larger family of
European modernisms. Bulgarian modernism is a close analogy both in its division into old and new (there
is a rough correspondence in the years as well) and in its belated emergence on the wider cultural plane of
Europe.

295
emergent consciousness.
523
Unanumo, one of the leaders of modernismo, had said of his
generation that authors ‘tenemos que europeizarnos y chapuzarnos en el pueblo’
524
(we
must Europeanize ourselves and plunge ourselves into the people), thus uniting two
tendencies: innovation in sync with the current trends in Europe, on the one hand, and
pentration of the depths of folklore, on the other. These two tendencies went hand in hand
during the later phase as well. Popularism (diving deep into the culture of el pueblo) was
the other side of the coin of experimental modernism.
But isn’t this co-option of Lorca as a popular poet similar to his being cast as a gypsy
by the poeple Dalí called ‘the putrefactos’? The same poet, who was to end up becoming
instrumental in the history of the traditional copla through his celebrated collaboration
with La Argentinita, seems unwilling to accept the label of popular poet. Lorca’s relation
to the popular is, indeed, ridden with ambiguity. In a 1935 interview he stated:
I do not seek popularity. It comes to me. At times, it bothers me. A poet should
not be interested in popularity; it is a rather trivial thing. In any case, if the poet
becomes popular, if he enters into the soul of the people, what can be more
beautiful than that? To enter into the soul of the people – now, there is the
poetry!
525

In a 1926 lecture at the Ateneo de Valladolid, Lorca was adamant that his Romancero
was a book ‘anti-picturesque, anti-folkloric, anti-flamenco.’ In this book, there was ‘not
even one waist-coat, not one bull-fighter’s costume, not one flat sombrero, not one

523
Yeats had expressed the same view.

524
Cited in Robertson, p. 17.

525
‘… no busco la popularidad. Ella viene a mi. A veces me molesta. A un poeta no debe interesarle la
popularidad; es una cosa demasiado frívola. De todas formas, si el poeta deviene popular, si entra en el
alma del pueblo, ¿quiere algo más bello? ¡Entrar en el alma del pueblo, he aquí la poesía!’ (Cited in
Genovese, p. 31)

296
tambourine.’
526
In this poetry collection, one could scarcely see the easily seen
Andalusia; instead, the book presented the invisible Andalusia.
527
This unseen Andalusia,
shimmering on the underside of the popular, is a vernacular location, hidden from easy
view and yet all too real. The folk whom Lorca stages in both the Romancero and Poema
del cante jondo is the gypsy (a marginalized and persecuted figure) who, in Lorca’s much
quoted formulation, represented ‘the most elevated, the most profound, the most
aristocratic of my country’ and who ‘kept guard over the burning coals, the blood and the
alphabet of truth, both Andalusian and universal.’
528

The gypsy staged in these books was consciously designed to subvert stereotypical
nineteenth-century representations of Andalusia with their sentimental trappings and a
cast of heroes including brigands, down-at-the-elbow vagrants, passionate gypsies, etc. In
this sense, Lorca’s project is vernacular since it explores the unrepresented side of the
popular. His comment that poetry consists in entering the (hidden) soul of the people
should be read in the context of Lorca’s vernacular aesthetics which could denounce
popularisms of the sentimental (or costumbro) type at the same time as it embraces a
return to el pueblo and its folkloric traditions.
Over and above the fact that Lorca’s poetry is indebted to a thematic interest in popular
traditions, it could be seen as part and parcel of his larger performative aesthetic vision.

526
‘Un libro anti-pintoresco, anti-folklórico, anti-flamenco. Donde no hay ni una chaquetilla corta ni un
traje de torero, ni un sombrero plano ni una pandereta.’ (Obras Completas III, p. 340)

527
‘apenas está expresada la Andalucía que se ve, pero donde está temblando la que no se ve.’ (Ibid, p. 340 )

528
‘lo más elevado, lo más profundo, lo más aristocrático de mi país, lo más representative de su modo y el
que guarda el ascua, la sangre y el alfabeto de la verdad andaluza y universal.’ (Ibid., p. 340)
297
In turn, this vision, which places performance at its center, is part of Lorca’s life-long
project expressed both in his literary and his musical art. His memorable profile as a lover
of folk song and flamenco is hard to ignore. While staying at the Residencia de
Estudiantes between 1919 and 1928, Lorca gave numerous piano performances of folk
songs, ‘from the Andalusian songs learned directly to songs taken from printed
collections’. Indeed, as Robertson points out, Lorca’s enthusiasm for popular song was
contagious at the Residencia where the burgeoning Spanish intellectual elite ‘identified in
these nameless songs something akin to a national treasure. Eventually the renewed
appreciation for this art became a hallmark for the entire generation.’
529
Not only that,
but Lorca also played the guitar in the traditional way. As Edward Stanton attests:
Lorca’s father had the custom of organizing flamenco sessions at his son’s natal
house in Fuentevaqueros, near Granada. The poet inevitably found a guitar in his
lap at an early age and even took lessons from an aunt. They did not last long,
since he turned to a serious study of the piano. But as late as his stay in New
York, he apparently still “played the guitar with great verve and spontaneity.”
530

Stanton summarizes Lorca’s musical activities after 1922, the year of the “Concurso del
Cante Jondo”:
From this point on, all of Lorca’s musical activity was devoted to Spanish folk
songs. Never a mere regionalist, he studied anthologies compiled in all parts of
the Peninsula and collected ballads from regions other than Andalusia. He
incorporated pieces from the medieval and Renaissance Cancioneros into the
classic Spanish plays he directed as head of an itinerant, nonprofessional group,
“La Barraca.” He also harmonized a dozen or so folk songs which are popular to
this day. They come from various parts of Spain, but the most characteristic are
probably those he heard as a child in the Granadine countryside. His drama

529
Lorca, Alberti, and the Theater, p. 41.

530
Stanton, Edward, The Tragic Myth. Lorca and Cante Jondo, The University Press of Kentucky, 1978, p.
36. Actually these lessons continued in another important form, as we shall see later on.

298
could be seen as a modern continuation of Spain’s Golden Age theater, with its
popular inspiration and fusion of plastic, musical, and dramatic elements. He
also liked the zarzuela of Spanish light opera when performed in good taste…
Just as he was attracted to Golden Age theater and opera, Lorca was inevitably
drawn to cante jondo. The joining of singer, dancer, musician, and public
approached the ideal of a composite art form for which he sought expression all
his life.
531

The Lectures: Folklore as Aesthetic Theory
The performative dimension of Lorca’s aesthetic position is most palpably evident in
his lectures delivered in the 1920s to various audiences. In many ways, they constitute
both a defense and a call to action in an urgent context of literary and cultural
rejuvenation. The role of folklore in this context is seen as crucial; traditional local
materials, well-nigh forgotten and relegated to the status of inconsequential minority, had
a proven, if neglected, pedigree as well as a rich potential to instill into modern Spanish
(and even European) culture their ageless qualities.
While insisting that he was not a ‘gypsified’ (agitanado) poet, Lorca unambiguously
placed some of his poetry in the context of flamenco performance, while his aesthetic
theory is centered in the trope of the folklorist’s encounter with the vernacular. Hence,
Lorca’s surprise at the richness of the cradle song (canción de cuna) and the deep song of
the gypsies (cante jondo) is more than simply a piece of biography. Together with the
theory of the duende, the hidden wonder of folklore is a pillar in his aesthetic system. The
theory of the duende is itself an exercise in a kind of vernacular theodicy. In this section,
I will briefly examine these two pillars.

531
The Tragic Myth, pp ix-x.
299
A) Lorca’s discovery of the hidden treasure of folklore:
To get to the essence of real flamenco, Lorca had to leapfrog cheap contemporary
imitations as well as topple stereotypes regarding an art form with a rather complicated
history. Lorca’s lecture on cante jondo delivered at the Concurso, which he helped
organize with de Falla in 1922, was a rhetorical challenge since he was probably facing a
more or less hostile audience which needed some convincing of the virtues of flamenco
as a form of art. Hostility towards flamenco, as Felix Grande has shown, spread far and
wide during Lorca’s time. In a sense, Lorca had to negotiate a mine-field due to the
‘disdain for flamenco which had engulfed, almost without exception, the whole cultural
world, including the universities and conservatories.’ For Grande, this was ‘a phase
which lasted during the last third of the nineteenth century and continued at least up until
1922.’
532

The bad reputation which the café cantante brought to flamenco necessitated that Lorca
pay respect to the widely held opinion regarding the supposedly debauched (under-)world
of flamenco performers. To simply deny this reputation would not be good tactics.
Instead, Lorca responded to the oratorical pressure by playing a strategic game which
granted the stereotype only to subvert it in a radical way. Lorca knew that behind the
popular image of flamenco, there lay the other (“real”) flamenco accessible to only those

532
‘desdén que en contra del flamenco se apoderó, casi sin excepciones, del mundo del poder cultural,
incluidas las universidades y los conservatorios. Es una etapa que duró todo el ultimo tercio del siglo XIX y
se alargó, cuando menos, hasta 1922.’ (Grande, Felix, García Lorca y el Flamenco, Mandadori: Madrid,
1992, p. 59) The disdain for folk music was apparently international and continued well after the year of
the concurso. Thus, Adorno, as a critic of culture, expostulated against folk (and, for that matter, jazz)
music without having a clear understanding of what it actually was (see Adorno, Theodor, Quasi Una
Fantasia. Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Verso: London, 1963).

300
few who had experienced firtst-hand the intimate space of the flamenco de pura cepa (the
pure flamenco, the ”real” thing). The whole lecture could be seen as an example of
vernacular pressure: to present the secret as secret and yet concede to the know-alls that
they know all about it by telling them they do not really have a clue.
In his lectures on deep song, Lorca casts himself as someone who tells a secret about
that wondrous thing, the unpopular popular. His opening gambit, however, is to start with
the familiar. ‘You have all heard about cante jondo and probably have some, more or less
exact, idea of it’, Lorca assures his audience. ‘[B]ut … for those who do not know its
historical and artistic importance, it invokes the memory of something vulgar, of the
drinking place, of wild parties [juerga], of the café podium…’
533
To discover the secrets
of folklore, Lorca shows a preference for hidden pockets of culture, for off-the-road paths
to the folkloric clearing. Like the local culture of his Granada, whose essence was to be
found in small things, aesthetic value was to be sought in neglected folkloric genres such
as cante jondo and the lullaby.
534
Once the folklorist/poet/musician stumbles upon the
wondrous clearing, the only reaction possible is to wonder at the hidden beauty and
complex nature of the misunderstood tradition.

533
‘Todos habéis oído hablar del cante jondo y, siguramente, tenéis una idea más o menos exacta de él…;
pero es casi seguro que a todos los no iniciados en su transcendencia histórica y artistica, os evoca cosas
inmorales, la teberna, la juerga, el tablado del café…’ (Federico García Lorca. Obras Completas, Tomo III,
p. 195.

534
In his lecture ‘Homenaje a Soto de Rojas’, Lorca draws a charming tableau of Granada (and the whole
of Andalucia) as a vernacular location. Huddled between mountains, distanced from easy traffic, ‘Granada
(and Andalucia in general) loves small things. In the local language, even the verbs are diminutive.’
Granada cannot leave its home (its vernacular location). ‘For this reason, the typical Granadian aesthetics is
the aesthetics of the diminutive, the aesthetics of small things.’ (Granada ama lo diminuto. Y en general
toda Andalucía. El lenguaje del pueblo pone los verbos en diminutivo… Por eso la estética genuinamente
granadina es la estética del diminutive, la estética de las cosas diminutas.’ (Obras Completas III, pp 249-
250).

301
So Lorca plays his trump card to its fullest effect. He lets his “knowing” audience know
that just when the sincere cry of the gypsy seguiriya was being drowned by the noise of
the flamenco cabarets, one had to get off the beaten path in order to trace the ancient
origins of deep song. Like a true folklorist, he feared that it was on the point of extinction
and needed someone to hasten to its rescue. The outcome of this encounter with this
unpopular popular was an attitude of humble surprise at the richness of folklore. Lorca’s
lecture on the lullaby stages a similar wonder – this time it is surprise at the
consciousness which this supposedly unconscious folk form shows.
535

In many ways, Lorca’s rhetorical strategy has become a commonplace by both
defenders and detractors of flamenco. The focus on flamenco’s hazy origins makes it

535
Schiller's analysis of the naïve and sentimental in literature is especially relevant to the discussion of
literary appropriations of folkloric materials. Lorca’s aesthetic position vis-à-vis folklore seems to be
precisely a tug-of-war between these two principles. It is in the context of this aesthetic tug-of-war that
Lorca’s discovery of the vernacular energies of folkloric materials should be placed. On the one side stands
the surprise (Schiller’s naïve of surprise) evident in Lorca’s lectures on folklore. On the other side stand the
sentimental trappings of his poetry and his fascination with gypsy culture and gypsy identity. Given this
posture of naivite, it is tempting to resolve the tug-of-war by having recourse to Schiller's improved concept
of the naïve, i.e. the naïve of temperament. No longer simply the 'naive of surprise' (the unconscious,
childish, primitive, simple, passive attitude to nature), the 'naive of temperament' (where art is reflective,
active, conscious while masking itself as free from the fetters of consciousness and logic) seems like a safe
anchor in the attempt to come to terms with the Lorca’s appropriation of folklore. The tempting way of
putting it is that Lorca was essentially sentimental (how could he not be when he was, after all, an outsider
to the folk?) but masked himself as naively surprised in his encounter with the richness of the folk tradition.
In Schiller’s aesthetic theory, the naïve of temperament is a compromise between the naïve of surprise and
the sentimental. This is a consciousness which convincingly recasts itself as unconsciousness. The naive of
temperament gets to keep some of the connotations of the naive (e.g. fresh look, freedom from the
inhibitions of conventional poetics, or from what Lorca calls education or grammar) while stressing the
element of artistic mastery over the material. But should Lorca, a masterful modernist, be seen in these
terms? Is there no way to describe Lorca’s aesthetic position as more radical than this? Can we, perhaps,
see the resolution of the tug-of-war no longer in the conscious (modernist) masking itself as unconscious
(folk) but in a denaturalized conscious folklore (now no longer seen as natural, stable, traditional,
unconscious) celebrating its own consciousness? It is precisely the consciousness of folklore that the lecture
on the lullaby stresses. At the same time, behind both the lecture on deep song and the lecture on the
lullaby stands a concerned modernist wishing to slide into folklore, to keep intact the wonder of the
encounter with the folkloric. Are we not, then, seeing the naive of surprise at work – surprise at the
consciousness of folklore?

302
easier to propound almost any theory about this hybrid folk form. Even at its neatest, the
story leaves huge gaps unexplained. It is precisely these lacunae that Lorca targets.
Candelas Newton repeats the most popular version of the history of flamenco in a
nutshell:
Lorca based his lecture on Falla’s research on Deep Song. In the lecture, he
differentiates this musical form (the most ancient primitive music in Europe,
originating in songs of India), from its modern popularized version, flamenco.
Although Deep Song is associated with Gypsies, they did not originate it. When
Gypsies arrived in Spain in the middle of the fifteenth century they found in
Andalusia an indigenous musical tradition consisting of Arabic and Hebrew
elements which they fused with their own music. To it they added elements
similar to those found in Hindu chant, such as enharmnonic modulation and the
reiterative use of one sustained note. The resulting combination is what is known
today as Deep Song.
536

This is actually a pre-history of flamenco. Someone like Timothy Mitchell, who is
interested in debunking idealized versions of the story, would stress the
“institutionalization” of flamenco (although Mitchell would probably not put it like that)
in taverns and café cantantes. For him, as for Gerhard Steingress (the other major
debunker of flamenco myths), the origins of the genre are inextricably linked with
brothels, with violence and immorality. What such scholars are interested in showing is,
of course, the constructed nature of flamenco (In other words, there is no such thing as
the flamenco puro which “essentialists” talk about and which the jubilant
performer/listener at the flamenco juerga greets with the traditional cry Eso es! This cry –

536
Newton, Candelas, Understanding Federico García Lorca, University of South Carolina Press, 1995, p.
19.
303
part of traditional exclamations during performance known as jaleo – is, needless to say,
itself constructed).
537

William Washabaugh bridges the two camps (the idealism of gitanophile flamenco
enthusiasts and the social constructionism of skeptics for whom categories like gitano,
puro flamenco, etc, are “inventions”): he agrees with the larger point of the
constructionists (that inventions play a big part in the construction of flamenco) but
argues that one should not ignore the fact that ‘inventions become history.’
The invention of “Gitano” in the nineteenth century is not some sort of ethnic
epiphenomenon. “Gitano” is not a byproduct of other, more clearly real,
historical forces… Rather what was invented yesterday has become today’s
reality from which future social practices are launched.
538

In response to the skepticism of social constructionism, Felix Grande (perhaps the most
distinguished gitanophile non-gitano enthusiast) focuses not so much on the immoral
atmosphere (which he grants) of the flamenco cabarets and café cantantes but on their
historical role in the formation of flamenco as a genre. Now, this could be precisely the
point of someone like Mitchell. The crucial difference is that Grande emphasizes the
architecture of actual flamenco performance (which he gets right) and not so much the
architecture of the social milieu, to put it politely, in which flamenco was performed. For

537
Critiquing the gitanismo (Mitchell’s term is ‘gitanophilia’) of a whole generation of flamencologists,
Mitchell employs shock tactics which sometimes make his view of flamenco sound like an academic
tantrum thrown at those ‘tardo-romantics’ who had built an effigy in honor of an imaginately constructed
figure known as the Gypsy. His idea of the flamenco voice is diametrically opposite to that of Lorca: ‘The
so-called gitano style, marked by alcoholic vocal effects, mock hysterics, and fatalistic lyrics, is, among
other things, the aesthetic result of the codependency syndrome that prevailed between power-abusing,
substance-abusing libertines and their singing, dancing, guitar-strumming menials.’ (Mitchell, Timothy,
Flamenco Deep Song, Yale University Press, 1994, pp. 209, 215)

538
Op. cit., p. 76.

304
Grande, the café cantante was, in addition, the place where a lot of talent, which would
otherwise have remained dispersed on the street, had the opportunity to congregate and
thus codify many of the generic characteristics of flamenco as a musical form.
539
The
café cantante was a venue where innovation and experimentation took place during the
crucial formative years of flamenco. That Lorca was more than capable of seeing beyond
the stereotypical seediness of the flamenco demi-monde with its café cantantes (in spite
of the general opinion, held among literary scholars misled by his lecture, that he
subscribed to the seediness thesis) is evident from his celebration of Silverio Franconetti
– a flamenco legend who owned and performed in a café cantante that helped change
flamenco history.
It is not hard to place Lorca’s idealistic exploration of the origins of flamenco if we go
by his lectures. He belongs squarely in the pro-gitano essentialist camp; but what is
important to note is his interest, like that of Grande, on performance and on the musical
qualities of flamenco. For all the talk of social constructionism, the actual dynamics of
the flamenco performance – the musical characteristics of this highly complex
(‘sophisticatedly popular’ as Lorca called it
540
) art – has remained a secret. Lorca’s
idealism is thus more subtle than meets the eye. Always interested in musical
technicalities, Lorca recuperates the acoustic detail of the flamenco performance by
having recourse to the rhetoricdal strategy of returning to flamenco’s hazy origins.

539
Op. cit., p. 98.

540
Cited in Morris, Brian, Son of Andalusia. The Lyrical Landscapes of Federico García Lorca, Vanderbilt
University Press: Nashville, Tennessee, 1997, p. 183.

305
La siguiriya comienza por un grito terrible. Un grito que divide el paisaje ne dos
hemisferios ideales; después la voz se detiene para dejar paso a un silencio
impresionante y medido. Un silencio en el cual fulgura el rostro de lirio caliente
que ha dejado la voz por el cielo. Después comienza la melodía ondulante e
inacabable en sentido distinto al de Bach. La melodía infinita de Bach es
redonda, la frase podría repetirse eternamente en un sentido circular; pero la
melodía de la siguiriya se pierde en el sentido horizontal, se nos escapa de las
manos y la vemos alejarse hacia un punto de aspiración común y pasión perfecta
donde el alma no logra desembarcar.
541

This is no mere idealistic claptrap but precise musical detail lacking institutionalized
explanatory protocol to back it up. It is an explanation of acoustic specificity which
sounds idealistic only because it aims to be precise.
If flamenco was invented, what exactly does this invention, speaking technically,
amount to? What are its rhythms, its peculiarities of a musical form? What is a good
model for its successful performance? The last question already takes us to the theory of
the duende. In its folkloric obstinacy, flamenco is excessive
542
sound, intense focus on
precise detail, and communal ritualism. Unlike the classical guitar, where the aim is to
make a clear round sweet sound, the flamenco guitar requires a significant amount of

541
‘Arquitectura del Cante Jondo’, Obras Completas III, p. 218. (The gypsy seguiriya begins with a
terrifying cry which shatters the landscape into two idealistic hemispheres. After that, the voice is arrested
and gives way to a silence, impressive and measured. A silence sparkling like the face of the hot iris which
has left its voice in the heavens. Then begins the melody [of the guitar?], undulating and endless in a way
distinct from that of Bach. The infinite melody of Bach is round in the sense that the phrase could repeat
itself eternally in circles. But the melody of the seguiriya gets lost horizontally. It wriggles out of our hands
and we see it receding in the distance to a point of common aspiration and perfect passion where the soul
cannot find a haven.) As in his Poema del cante jondo (with its sections devoted to the different segments
of the flamenco act arranged in sequential order), this nutshell description follows the actual performance
very closely: first the landscape, quiet and expecting, then the initial cry (the ¡Ay! of flamenco), then the
silence, then the entry of the guitar, and finally the common passion expressed in singing, dancing, guitar-
playing, and rhythm-keeping of all kinds.

542
‘El duende no se repite’, Lorca states, ‘como no se repiten las formas del mar en la borrasca.’ Obras
Completas III, p. 316. (The duende does not repeat itself like the forms of the raging sea-storm do not
repeat themselves.) If the duende stands for the improvisational aspects of performance, it also brings the
quality of excess in performance.

306
muscle-work. The sound is powerful and loud. The performance overall (dance, hand-
clapping, singing, drumming) is intense and ergonomic. When all traditional components
of the performance are combined in an inspired way, the performer is said to possess
duende.
B) The theory of the duende as vernacular theodicy
Lorca's theory of the duende is an aesthetic category designed to leapfrog aesthetic
traditions. Aiming for a category which transcends art (one of the typical instantiations of
the duende is bull-fighting), Lorca is on to a theodicy of the unknown god of the local
tradition. The duende is a kind of vernacular god who was born from the local suffering
of the gypsies in order to become a concrete, albeit mysterious, principle in art.
If the gypsies need someone to look over them, someone other than the Christ, why
could that not be the duende which blesses with its presence the performer of the tradition?
From a very early stage in Lorca's poetry, the gypsy is the performing folk, the folk of
performance. As an electric X-factor in the folkloric enactment, the duende does not
occur in specific poems, acts or scenes. It is in the atmosphere. The performer does not
control it; like a spirit invoked from the deep recesses of the earth, the duende is not an
arbitrary apparition. If the right formula is followed, its visitation is guaranteed – only, no
body fully possesses the formula. But the duende is there – it will not disappoint – even
those who are not connoiseurs notice something strange in the air. It is easy to see that the
duende stands for that mystery of the vernacular which the outsider cannot fathom. The
play on outside/inside in Lorca's lecture on the duende spells this out even more clearly.
This ever-retreating glow-worm is the sole possession of the performer of the tradition –
307
this is his/her wealth. Buried in the deep nether regions of traditional performance, the
duende arises when it is provoked in the right way. In art, as in folklore, the dance with
the duende is what constitutes the ultimate marker of value.
The centrality of this vernacular aesthetic category allows the folk performer, a close
acquaintance of the duende, to become the most valuable model for emulation. But how
can the modernist poet, the external observer that he is, summon the duende? Faced by
this question, Lorca invites the idea of the possibility to perform a voluntary identity to
the table of his vernacular aesthetics. While being peripheral to the folk, the poet may
voluntarily become the folk and take upon himself the task to express/perform the folk’s
essence. But this does not make the vernacular universal or cosmopolitan. The vernacular,
being peripheral, is precisely not of the world. The duende, like gypsy culture, hides from
view.
When the two beneficiaries of the presence of the duende (the gypsy and the performer)
are stood side by side, Lorca's intricate relation to the folk becomes a little clearer. The
gypsy performer (a dramatic person in life as well) or the performer of gypsiness (a
gypsy in art, the stage of life) constantly give and take to and from each other. The
duende is that logical category which assures the easy traffic of the folk's slippery
essence. The duende is the god/ghost/guardian of gypsies/performers.
For Lorca, it is an irony that the best in art hides itself from the historical records. No
one really knows where cante jondo came from. Who carried the duende on their
shoulders like a testament ark? Likewise, no type of poetry, including the poetry of the
gypsy deep song, possesses duende. And yet, the tradition of folkloric performance, with
308
its specific genres, is intimately connected to this ghost. It seems that, in the final analysis,
certain specific features of folk genres, when they are augmented in performance, allow
the performer to rise to such heights that the duende deigns to make an appearance. The
tradition hovers in the air waiting to bless the hands that play, the voice that sings, the
feet that dance. Following de Falla, Lorca called these features ‘black notes’ (sonidos
negros). ‘Everything that has black notes had duende’. The black notes came from the
black pain (pena negra) of the gypsies. The singing voice in the gypsy seguiriya, solea,
petenera, etc., modulates between notes which cannot be registered by musical notation.
If the gypsies do not have a god to alleviate their suffering in the world, they have a
secret code by which they can call the duende into being.
543
It seems then that Lorca’s
aesthetic model is the performative enactment so crucial to the understanding of folklore.
With his poetry, Lorca, quite literally, stepped into the chain of the folkloric tradition by
having some of his poems taken up by the people and circulated within their own clearing.
Flamenco Ole!
In a letter to Alfonso Salazar, 2 August 1921, Lorca describes a kind of scene of
seduction which was to serve as a model for his poetic performance:
Besides, didn’t you know, I am learning to play the guitar. It seems to me that
flamenco is one of the most gigantic creations of the Spanish people. I already
accompany fandangos, peteneras and the gypsy songs: tarrantas, bulerías,
romeras. Every evening el Lombardo (a wonderful gypsy) comes to teach me
together with Frasquito of the Fountain (another splendid gypsy). Both play and
sing brilliantly, reaching the farthest depths of popular feeling.
544

543
Manuel de Falla’s by now famous phrase: ‘Todo lo que tiene sonidos negros tiene duende.’ (Obras
Completas, Tomo III, p. 307)

544
‘Además, ¿no sabes?, estoy aprendiendo a tocar la guitarra. Me parece que lo flamenco es una de las
creaciones más gigantescas del pueblo español. Acompaño ya fandangos, peteneras y er cante de los
309
Flamenco was, for Lorca, the typical example of the connection between folk
performance and duende. In this sense, it was folklore par excellence. But what does the
flamenco act consist in? Maria Delgado stresses both the crucial role of flamenco in
Lorca’s writing and the difficulty of analyzing the details of its significance:
While flamenco has proved a powerful idiom in the production and reception of
Andalusian culture, the careful tracing of its codified ethics and performative
language have all too often been substituted by glib generalizations and a
reinforcing of problematic stereotypes that equate the country’s cultures with
sangria, bullfighting and castanets.
545

But the duende is in the details. Curiously, one feels the need to send Lorca to the
flamenco clearing, the juerga, to which he referred in his lecture on cante jondo as one of
those ‘vulgar’ (inmorales) things invoked by the word flamenco. That Lorca was not
against the juerga as such should be obvious from his friend’s statement, however
idealistic, which charts an intimate space of poetic enactment based on the folkloric
encactment:
For Federico García Lorca, the best reader, the unique one, whom he, not the
poem, sought, was not a speaker but a listener. Just like cante jondo shies away
from the tablado and confines itself in the intimacy of the juerga, so the “cante
jondo” of our great Andalusian manifests itself in his poetic juerga. Thus I
responded to Federico’s recitations.
546

gitanos: tarrantas, bulerías, romeras. Todas las tardes viene a enseñarme el Lombardo (un Gitano
maravilloso) y Frasquito er de la Fuente (otro gitano espléndido). Ambos tocan y cantan de una manera
genial, llegando hasta lo más hondo del sentimiento popular.’ (Cited by Felix Grande in García Lorca y el
Flamenco, 1992, p, 33)

545
Federico García Lorca. Routlege Modern and Contemporary Dramatists, Routledge: London and New
York, 2008, p. 16.

546
‘Para Federico García Lorca el lector primero – el único – a quien él, no el poema, buscaba, no era el
lector sino el oyente. Como el “cante jondo” rehuye el tablado y se confina en la intimidad de la juerga, el
“cante jondo” de nuestro gran andaluz se manifesta dentro de la juerga poética. Así llamaba yo a las
recitaciones de Federico.’ (Guillén, Jorge, Federico en Persona. Semblanza y Epistolario, Emecé Editores:
Buenos Aires, 1959, pp 37-8)

310

The flamenco juerga includes a lot of components perpetuated by the tradition. From
start to finish, the flamenco enactment is more than a communal song performed for the
amusement of the participants or onlookers. It is impossible to kibbitz passively as the
song takes up in its rhythm the emotions of the day and mashes them into an
indecipherable mixture which crushes the ‘I’ with its abstract but insistent sound.
The gypsy seguiriya begins with a terrifying cry which shatters the landscape
into two ideal hemispheres. This is the cry of the dead generations, a piercing
elegy of ages gone by; it is a pathos-laden memento of love under other moons,
and other winds.
547

In the ‘ay’ of flamenco, the voice is, in the words of Luis Rosales, ‘pure expression’.
Before the song has begun, before the letter of the verse (copla) makes its point, the
sound of the ‘terrible cry’ ushers in a dimension of language which is before signification,
‘as if language did not yet exist’.
548
There are many versions of the ay depending on the
sub-genre/style.
549
In Lorca’s poem ‘Аy!’, the voice asks: ‘Leave me in this field/crying.
(Dejadme en este campo/llorando)’.
550
This is the ‘ay’ of the soleá, which stands for
solitude and is the most personal of flamenco styles. After this cry, ‘Everything has
broken in the world./ Nothing but silence remains.’ Snatches of landscape creep in

547
‘La seguiriya gitana comienza por un grito terrible, un grito que divide el peisaje en dos hemisferios
ideales. Es el grito de las generaciones muertas, la aguda elegia de los siglos desaparecidos, es la patética
evocación del amor bajo otras lunas i otros vientos.’ (Obras Completas, III, p. 198)

548
Cited in Gypsy Cante. Deep song of the caves, selected and translated by Will Kirkland, City Lights
Books: San Francisco, p. 1.

549
For a selection of flamenco sub-genres, and ay’s, see Carlos Saura filmic anthology Flamenco (1995).

550
All references to Lorca’s poetry are from the revised bilingual edition, Federico García Lorca, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux: New York, 2002. The fragment/poem ‘Ay!’ is from the section titled ‘Poema de la
Soleá’ in Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo, pp 110-11.

311
between the silences left in the aftermath of the solitary cry. The cry comes back to insist:
‘I already told you to leave me/ in this field/ crying.’ It is as if signification is debarred
from this acoustic clearing. The only thing left is the ‘shadow’ which the ‘shout… leaves
on the wind’. Thus pure sound is involved in a constant struggle for supremacy with the
verses which create meaning. At the end of the poem called ‘La Soleá’, the abstract cry
becomes the sonic bedrock of the refrain ‘Dressed in black mantles’: ‘¡Ay yayayayayay,/
que vestida con mantos negros!’
551
The terse refrain, carrier of delphic meaning, is not
resolved or decoded but is left to drown in the sound of the prolonged high-pitched cry. It
is as if the tradition refuses to decipher its own fragments.
Surrounded by nothingness on both sides, the flamenco song is a sharp line which goes
nowhere. In the meantime, while it is still sounding, this precise line unifies the sounds of
the singing voice, the guitar, the handclapping (palmas), and the dancing steps. It is as if
the tradition of past enactments passes by – like a fast bandwagon – and all participants in
the act must catch it in its stride. While riding the bandwagon, the participants follow its
steady groove. As if by a miracle, they all get off the moving vehicle together – in one
breath – without warning or previous rehearsal. The first to announce the advent of the
wagon is usually the guitar with its llamada (call). Once on the wagon, it invites the rest
of the cast to join in. The rhythmic contours of the strumming patterns (rasgueados)
serve as so many sing-posts on the road to nowhere. Each style has its own groove, and to
get on and off it, one has to keep one’s ear alert to the tradition which hovers in the air.

551
‘Poema de la Soleá’ in Poema del Cante Jondo, ibid., pp 106-7. In ‘El Grito’ (‘The Cry’) from ‘Poema
de la Siguiriya Gitana’, the ay occupies the space between verses and has the last say before the fragment
‘El Silencio’ (The Silence) announces the ay’s ‘undulating’ wake.
312
Thus the flamenco enactment is a fight. The voice of the singer is engaged in a perpetual
wrestling match with the voice of the tradition. The guitar both accompanies and wrestles
with the singing voice and the dancing steps. As each performer has his or her own
groove, his or her own way of riding the wagon, a difficult unity is reached at the cost of
intense concentration. The function of the verse in this multilateral fight is to demarcate
each station of the wagon’s road. Since verse sections are of predictable length (e.g.
traditional coplas are most often made up of three or four verses), with predictable
silences, syllabication, and musical endings (remate), the sung words guide the whole
unified flamenco act. This allows the performers’ attention to focus on keeping the unity
of melody and rhythm (compás) in between familiar signposts. Before all participants
come to rest together on a familiar oasis, they can display their virtuosity by taking
different paths to the same rest-stop.
In their passage from one oasis to the next, the singing voice modulates within the
harmonic range provided by the chords strummed on the guitar. It is difficult to tell who
accompanies who in this wrestling match – and yet, the voice of the singer has priority.
As he/she commences the next verse, the cast keeps their ears cropped for clues. Most
styles travel across specific registers: e.g. the bulería (a fast-paced flamenco sub-genre)
can sing of love in a profoundly emotional manner before following up with a flimsy
comic rhyme. Each register (or genre within the sub-genre) has its own verses whose
thematic make-up serves as a clue to all other components of the enactment. In the comic
section of the bulería, for instance, it is customary to strum less complex rhythmic patters,
to dance a bit more lightly, to clap with less syncopation. Thus, the theme of every verse
313
is a token of various performative meanings. A line sitting between silences on the
printed page begins, in actual performance, to mean more than what its thematic/motivic
make-up suggests. It is in this larger context of performance that motifs in Lorca’s poetry
should be studied. The performative hypertext is easy to miss if one focuses on
costumbristic details without awareness of what they stand for in the tradition of
flamenco performance.
Throughout, the performative act is punctured by impromptu background noises,
interjections, sudden unanimous silences, concealed locking of eyes communicating
agreement, and other traditional carriers of indexical meaning. It is easy to ignore these
minor, but crucial, elements of the juerga. When a lighter style is performed (cante
chico), these traditional markers lend to the enactment a particularly festive quality. (It is
party time, after all.) But even in the more serious styles (for which Lorca clearly showed
a preference), these markers add another layer to the meaning of the term
acompañamiento. When words are used (Ole!; Eso es!; Gloria!; Se toque bien!), these
are what Lorca calls ‘energetic cries’ (enérgicos).
552
In a sense, the whole act of the
flamenco company is an interjection, hence the interjectional aspect of Lorca’s flamenco
poetry.
Lorca’s lines sit embossed against an acoustic background whose details closely
emulate the flamenco act. From onomatopoeic representation of rhythmic noise (e.g. in
the fragment ‘All Night Fair’/‘Verbena’
553
, each verse is followed up by a nonsense

552
‘Juego y Teoria del Duende’ (Obras Completas, III, p. 311).

553
From Suites, op cit., pp 236-9.
314
refrain ‘Chin/ tata chin/ tata chin’ which is meant to serve as accompaniment for the
words and which could have been the actual rhythmic pattern in a real-life performance)
through sound-imitative descriptions of separate components of the enactment (e.g. ‘The
Six Strings’
554
is an extended acoustic metaphor for the sound the guitar makes) to actual
tricks borrowed from the singer’s kit of performance tools (e.g. in the fragment ‘Grito’
the words are scrambled in the same way as a singer would rearrange them in actual
performance, sounding a sequence of words differently each time he/she goes over the
same line
555
), Lorca’s flamenco poetry displays both intimacy with the tradition of
performance and a desire to frame the whole poetic act with a self-consciousness typical
of folkloric enactments.
556

Lorca’s Poetic Juerga
Lorca has so firmly and unequivocally been co-opted as a folk poet (by the flamenco
industry for instance) that to try to minimize his obvious debt to folklore (especially in
the poetry up to and including Romancero Gitano) is to ignore what seems like the most

554
From Poema del Cante Jondo, op. cit., pp 128-9.

555
‘Mosquito &/ moth/ bird/ & star./ What?/ Star & bird/ moth/ & mosquito’; from Suites, op. cit., pp 236-9.
The singer sometimes chooses to dwell on two adjacent lines by concatenating repetitions of the last part of
the first and the first part of the second line. This prolongs the sequence and creates a sense of call and
response within the verses.

556
One Bulgarian folk song begins by asking self-consciously if the song in the distance is the tune of a
turtledove trying to outplay the bagpipes. No, it is not the turtledove’s song, rather it is young Nedelya’s
voice putting to shame the playing of the bagpipes. Nedelya’s voice is, in turn, not heard directly but is
imitated by the subtle modulations of the clarinet. This song within the song is a standard folkloric device
whereby the separate components of the self-conscious performance imitate both one another and the
sounds of nature.

315
crucial element in both the production and the reception of his works.
557
Some critics find
a way out either by pointing to all the other components in Lorca’s oeuvre or by finding
support in Lorca’s self-proclaimed posture as more than just a flamenco poet; in both
cases, flamenco (and gypsy culture as a whole) is seen as only a theme, as one influence
among many.
The difficulty of coming to grips with Lorca’s indebtedness to folklore for the
construction of his aesthetic theory and poetry is further complicated by Lorca’s
conscious distancing of his work with traditional materials from contemporary literary
appropriations. For instance, he denounced direct imitations of traditional flamenco
poetry. In his lecture on cante jondo, Lorca distinguished between the “popular” poetry
created by poets in imitation of the folk tradition and the poetry that the anonymous
people themselves created. One was a paper – the other a natural rose.
Nothing but the very essence of this or that trill for its coloristic effect ought to
be drawn straight from the people. We should never want to copy their ineffable
modulations; we can do nothing but muddy them. Simply because of
education.
558

He reacted negatively to the charge that his Romancero Gitano was a gypsy book at the
same time as he claimed a gypsy identity for himself. He complained about contemporary
artistic appropriations of the folk – referring to what must have looked like a mass
phenomenon as ‘costumbrismo’ – at the same time as his poetry is replete with symbols
and tropes typical of museumized representations of traditional Andalusian culture. The

557
Even in his time, his poetry was studied by folklorists as genuine folklore.

558
Cited in Federico García Lorca. Collected Poems. Revised Bilingual Edition, Revised edition, with an
introduction and notes by Christopher Maurer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2002, p. xlvii.
316
decked-out gypsy dancer, the dagger-stricken lonely outcast, the airborn horseman, the
hair smelling of the olive-tree, the beloved in her small balcony receiving verses at
twilight, etc., are an integral part of Lorca’s poetic/folkloric paraphernalia. It is the
systematic use of this elaborate symbolical apparatus which creates a magnetic attraction
in Lorca’s folk-based poetry and makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that Lorca’s poetic
project amounts to a construction of a decorative local landscape.
A good reason to insist on the hybridized nature of Lorca’s poetry (of which folklore is
taken to be only one component) is to avoid the difficulty of resolving a paradox which is
nonetheless central to his aesthetics. The paradox consists in Lorca’s positioning himself
as peripheral to gypsy culture at the same time as he enthusiastically studied, collected
and lectured on folkloric materials associated with that vernacular culture. It seems that
Lorca, like Synge, had inherited the ambiguous position of the folklorist/ethnographer
who both merged with and remained foreign to his/her object of study.
Yes, there is a sense in which Lorca is not a mere flamencofied poet (aflamencado).
But there is also a very real sense in which his poetic performance follows the mode of
the flamenco enactment. However sentimental the trappings of Lorca’s poetry might be,
if one looks beyond what Lorca called the gypsy ‘theme’ (beyond landscapes and motifs),
one finds the difficult attempt to register the surprise of the encounter with the folk in its
own clearing. In his description of the gypsy seguiriya, Lorca emphasizes the physical
voice, the modulations untranscribable by musical notation, the rise and fall of emotion.
Curiously, in both his lectures and his poetry, Lorca seeks that moment of lull, of naïve
surprise which makes the excessively sharp sound heard during a folkloric act all the
317
more audible. It is not so much style that he intended to extract from his contact with
folklore; the essence of the folkloric act was in the ineffably modulating voice, the unity
of rhythm which makes one forget oneself, the cry of emotion abstracted to the point
when it becomes pure sound – ‘[n]othing but the very essence of this or that trill’.
559

In many ways, Lorca’s poetry is a yearning to represent sound. This thesis may sit
somewhat clumsily with the findings of most Lorca scholars who stress again and again
that Lorca’s poetry is not imitative. Edwards Stanton, for instance, labors hard to show
that Lorca did not simply imitate (but echoed) traditional songs.
560
But the distinction in
his erudite study, like similar distinctions made by other analysts, often seems specious.
For one thing, it is very hard to establish a strict demarcation between own and foreign,
between borrowed material and authorial intervention, especially when a poet works in
the popular vein. As Edward Honig points out, ‘It [Spanish literature] is constantly
hovering over the margin where the individual expression passes into the anonymous,
where what seems the most anonymous is actually the work of the most individual of

559
In the end, the lullaby can serve as a model for Lorca’s performative vernacular aesthetics. With its
excessive realism, it awakens the child to the harsh truths of life. At the same time, it constitutes a magic
path from consciousness to lulled self-forgetfulness. Initially, the song is the unconscious child's
introduction to a painful consciousness. But the ultimate goal of the lullaby is to allow consciousness to
become unconsciousness. The mother/tradition speaks to the child of the evils of life as the child responds
with surprised fear before drifting into sleep. However impossible it might be for the modernist poet to
remain in the space of lulled unconsciousness, the difficult process of drifting into sleep (in the case of the
child, it is accompanied by rebellion and tears) is at least a possible path. In this struggle with sleep, the
most one can reach is a dream-awakened state. In the words of a lullaby from Salamanca, ‘one of my eyes
is closed, the other half-open’: ‘Tengo sueño, tengo sueño,/ tengo ganas de dormir./ Un ojo tengo cerrado,/
otro ojo a medio abrir.’ (Obras Completas, p. 293). My translation: Sweet sleep is here/ sweet deep sleep / I
have one sleepy eye/ the other open keep.

560
See op. cit.

318
artists.’
561
For another, such distinctions usually ignore the acoustic dimension of poems.
Stanton, like most scholars who examine the connection between flamenco and Lorca’s
poetry, studies ‘certain basic motifs and themes’ which ‘are common to both Lorca’s
poetry and the world of flamenco.’ And yet, anything that smacks of ‘servile imitation of
folk poetry’ is eschewed in the analysis if only to prove that a high modernist’s work
must necessarily consist in distillation, filtering, echoing, or whatever the chosen terms is
which designates not so much the poetry itself but the anti-mimetic prejudice of the
analysis.
562

Interestingly enough, when the focus stops being themes and motifs, the acoustic
dimentions is immediately invited back to the discussion. In this respect, Stanton’s work
is a good example. When he comes to the role of the symbol of the guitar in Lorca’s
poetry, he digresses into a long disquisition of the way in which Lorca’s poetry represents
the sound of the guitar. This takes his analysis in the direction of those authors who had
also studied the role of the guitar. This is how he summarizes their findings:
Ángel del Rio has noted that music and poetry at times merge so completely that
the resulting sensation can only be translated by “imagining the deep plucking of
a guitar’s bass strings.” … Christoph Eich has gone even further in his
comparison between this volume and the sound of the guitar. He believes the
poems represent a pure transformation of the instrument’s music into words,
manifested in dynamic variations from piano to forte, in the delicate shadings of
tone color, and the richness of rhythms and pauses. According to Gustavo
Correa, the rhythmic feeling of the Poema del cante jondo could be interpreted
as the modulation of a human cry accompanied by the vibration of the guitar. A
kind of lyrical tension would be the primary structural principle of the work,

561
Op. cit., p. 30.

562
Op. cit., pp 30-1.

319
revealing itself in the human voice, in the pulsations of the guitar’s strings, and
in images of trembling, wavering, and undulation.
563

In a wonderfully insightful moment, Stanton compares a passage in the second part of the
Poema del cante jondo to a characteristic technique of the flamenco guitar – the sudden
damping of the strings by the palm whereby the sound is abruptly cut off and gives place
to a complete silence in the twinkling of an eye. The ‘No’ of the following passage in
Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías could be better heard in the light of this technique
called apagado:
¡Oh blanco muro de España!
¡Oh negro toro de pena!
¡Oh sangre dura de Ignacio!
¡Oh ruiseñor de sus venas!

No.
564

Well, here is an instance of imitation. In a sense, this is an imitative performativity and
Lorca’s poetry is rich in this quality. But it is more than just an imitation of this or that
flamenco cry (grito), this or that instrumental technique, etc.
In what follows, I will examine the Poema del cante jondo as a yearning after the
composite sound of the folkloric enactment. As Stanton is well aware, ‘Lorca was
inevitably drawn to cante jondo. The joining of singer, dancer, musician, and public
approached the ideal of a composite art form for which he sought expression all his

563
Ibid., p. 43.

564
Op. cit., p. 820.

320
life.’
565
The space of Lorca’s poetry is itself an acoustic clearing where the sound of the
folkloric enactment is heard – if only one could hear it. The Poema del cante jondo, in
particular, is a dreaming-back to the sonic space of the juerga or to the sonorous cave or
the silent desert space pierced by the individual cry of the seguiriya. Sometimes this ideal
sonorous space is the body of the guitar (but this is only one instance), sometimes, it is
simply the memory of the voice of a celebrated singer (as is the case with Lorca’s tribute
to Silverio Franconetti).
566

***
The rhythmic texture of the Poema often seems to borrow from the actual music – not
merely in the rather general sense that the ‘changes in tempo and intensity in the poem
recall the guitar’s variations in rhythm, tone color, and dynamics’
567
– but in the quite
literal sense of actual flamenco steps, beats and rhythmic structures. That such an exact
work in rhythm is perhaps to be expected from the Poema is evident from a comment
Lorca made during the rehearsal of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife in 1933:
You have just seen me paying attention to the rhythm and the smallest of details
and, in truth, one cannot proceed in any other way: songs are creatures, delicate
creatures, that must be cared for so that their rhythms are not altered a bit. Each

565
Op. cit., p. x. Lorca called this composite act ‘common striving’ (aspiración común); see note 541 above.

566
In what follows, I will try not to repeat the findings of other scholars who work in the same vein but will
still refer to their work where appropriate. Since we are a minority, it is especially urgent to contribute with
fresh material. Having said that, I do not wish to produce a strained analysis of the acoustics of Lorca’s
poetry. It seems to me, for instance, that Eich’s and Correa’s abovementioned claims about the role of the
guitar stretch the case a bit too much.

567
The Tragic Myth, p. 44.

321
song is a marvel of equilibrium that can easily be broken: it’s like a coin
balanced on the point of a needle.
568

In his lecture on lullabies, Lorca explains:

I’m trying to avoid scholarly detail that, when it doesn’t have much beauty in it,
wearies listeners; instead, I’m substituting emotional detail, because it’s more
interesting for you to know whether a melody stirs up a soft breeze that lulls one
to sleep or whether a song can place a simple landscape before the just closed
eyes of a child, than to know whether one melody is from the seventeenth
century or whether another is written in ¾ time, all of which the poet ought to
know, but not talk about, and which really is within reach of anyone who
devotes himself to such subjects.
569

Lorca was apparently very interested in rhythm, not just generally but from a technical
point of view. He had a good ear for music and for folk rhythms. Indeed, flamenco
rhythmic structures would be the first thing he would have learned from El Lombardo
and Frasquito of the Fountain, both splendid gypsies.
570
As Virginia Higginbotham points
out, without elaborating, ‘In Poema del cante jondo Lorca tries to recreate the world of
Andalusian folk music by imitating its rhythms and sounds.’
571
With ‘his feeling for song
(sentido del canto) and popular language (lenguaje popular)’, Lorca, according to Ramos-
Gil, had assimilated popular ‘rhythms and forms’ (ritmos y formas) as well as ‘the spirit
animating them’ (espiritu que los anima).
572

568
Cited in Londré, Felicia Hardison, Federico García Lorca, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.: New York,
1984, p. 69.

569
Cited in ibid., pp 69-70.

570
See letter to Alfonso Salazar cited above.

571
Higginbotham, Virginia, ‘Lorca’s Soundtrack: Music in the Structure of his Poetry and Plays’ in
“Cuando Yo Me Muera…”. Essays in Memory of Federico García Lorca, ed. Brian Morris, University
Press of America: Lanham, New York, 1988, pp 191 – 207 (p. 198).

572
Op. cit., p. 20.
322
In his plays Lorca insisted on measured rhythm much like the flamencos insist on
correct steps and compas. Indeed, for Lorca, drama was a ‘fiesta de cuerpo’ (fiesta of the
body).
It is necessary to present the fiesta of the body from the tips of the toes, in the
dance, to the top of the head, all governed by the view, the interpreter of what
takes place within. The body, its harmony, its rhythm, have been forgotten by
those men who place on the stage the frowning characters, seated with their
chins in their hands and introducing fear as soon as they are seen. It is necessary
to value the human body in the spectacle. I tend toward this.
573

In a letter to Jorge Guillén, Lorca wrote, ‘I wonder when I think that the musician’s
emotion rests and is wrapped in a perfect mathematical order.
574
And even though here
Lorca is probably talking about harmonic intervals, one wonders if his poetry does not
make use of the rhythmic algebra of folk song. ‘The nature that comes forth from the
hand of God is not the nature that must live in poems …. We might say that nature and
her tones receive the discipline of musical measure.’ The word for measure which Lorca
uses is ‘compás’. Can we say that Lorca’s poetry is, to use flamenco terminology, ‘a
compás’ (‘in time’) where even the silences are measured?
575

573
‘García Lorca presenta hoy tres canciones populares escenificadas’, cited in Smoot, Jean, A Comparison
of Plays by John Millington Synge and Federico García Lorca. The Poets and Time, Studia Humanitatis,
1978, p. 55.

574
Describing the measured control of the duende-inspired bullfighter, Lorca says, ‘in contrast, the torero
bitten by duende gives a lesson in Pythagorean music’ (Cited in ibid., p. 54). We saw that the duende
carries the improvisational quality of performance (it is like a raging strorm never repeating itself). Here, it
brings mathematical precision to the improvised performance.

575
‘La Imagen poética de Góngora’. All the passages in this paragraph are cited in ibid., pp 42-3.
Describing the flamenco act, Lorca explains that even the silence after the initial cry (grito) is measured
(‘medido’); see note 541 above.

323
The segment ‘Danza’ from the ‘Graphic of the Petenera’
576
is a good example of
syllabication based on flamenco steps. It can be marked according to an imaginary
footwork where the stresses of the words coincide with emphatic footsteps. The footwork
has to be fast enough to accommodate the speed of speech.

/ / ^ / / / ^ /
En la noche del huerto, (So far we have two identical groups of four steps)

^ / ^ / · · · · (Again two identical groups, this time of two steps each. As a
seis gitanas whole, they make another group of four. The silence following
these four steps could be filled by this missing group of four.
Alternatively, as I prefer, two steps may precede and another
two may follow the phrase.
577
In both cases, it is ‘a measured
silence.’)
/ ^ / / ^ / · ·
vestidas de blanco (Here we have two identical triplets: i.e. two groups of three
steps each. It is important not to render this line as a group of
four steps followed by an unfinished group of four. The
variation in rhythm between foursomes and threesomes is a
staple in a lot folk styles. The triplets, when they come, create a
feeling of slowed down tempo even though the steps continue
as before. Writing the line in triplets keeps this acoustic
illusion – a signature of a lot of folk music – intact.)

· · ^ / · · · · (The accent falls heavily on ‘bailan’ after two silent steps. This
bailan. seems appropriate given the meaning of the word and its
performative function in the poem.)

576
Op. cit., pp 128-9. What Lorca has named ‘Graphic of the Petenera’ (Gráfico de la Petenera) is in many
ways a graphic of sound.

577
· · ^ / ^ / · ·
seis gitanas

324
This poem could be accompanied by hand-clapping with all the emphases kept as they
are marked here. During the pauses (especially after ‘seis gitanas’ and ‘bailan’) the
palmas should continue – this will create a sense of continuity.
578

The excerpted section can be written thus:
▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
En·la·no·che·del·hu·erto · · seis·gi·ta·nas · · ves·ti·das·de·blan·co · · · · bai·lan · · · ·

Perhaps the most wonderful thing about flamenco percussion is that what is foregrounded
(marked here as dark triangles) makes absolutely no sense at first glance and yet follows
a strict logic. There seems to be no pattern, try hard as we might to establish one, since
the intervals between the accented beats form a rhythmic layer – on top of the ongoing
uniform beat series (represented here by slanted lines) – whose intervals are irregular.
Flamenco drumming consists of similar emphases organized in a seemingly chaotic
fashion. Actually, the logic of the groove is iron-clad. The beats form tightly organized
groups of four (this is the simplest case) and it is up to the drummer, hand-clapper, dancer
to accentuate according as he/she pleases. (Let me stress once again that this exercise
depends for its effect on fast execution. The suggested speed for hand-clapping for this
stanza is around 230 beats per minute – this allows the speaking voice to go through the
line without having to slow down unnaturally.) The irregularity of the intervals between
the stresses/accents (dark triangles) creates a sense of freedom in the otherwise strictly

578
In his filmed version of Lorca’s play Bodas de Sangre, Carlos Saura sensed this: troughout the movie,
the characters make measured rhythmic noises; but, more importantly, this happens even when there is no
dancing or any other action going on. Saura creates the feeling of flamenco rhythm going on eternally. This
is a groove which runs of its own accord, as it were, and all people can do is jump on and off it as they
choose. This objective rhythm goes on in the background whether one pays attention to it or not.
325
regulated space of the dance. The long interval occurring before the last word (bailan)
makes it sound as if it is deferred purposefully, which allows it to stand out all the more.
The whole poem ‘Danza’ could be rendered in this way, and the effects are wonderful
as the variations within what looks like a repetitive structure really begin to be heard.
Danza
(En el huerto de la Petenera)

En la noche del huerto, In the night of the garden,
seis gitanas six gypsy women
vestidas de blanco dressed in white
bailan. dance.
579

En la noche del huerto In the night of the garden,
Coronadas crowned
con rosas del papel with paper roses
y biznagas. and jasmine.
En la noches del huerto In the night of the garden,
sus dientes de nácar their teeth – mother-of-pearl –
escriben la sombra inscribe the burnt
quemada. darkness.

Y en la noche del huerto, And in the night of the garden,
sus sombras se alargan their shadows grow long
y llegan hasta el cielo and purple
moradas. as they reach the sky.
580

Thus, if we collect all second lines together, we obtain – one after the other – a number of
very different rhythmic groupings:
^ / ^ / · · · · (seis gitanas);
/ / ^ / · · · · (coronadas), which is a slight variation of ‘seis gitanas’;

579
In the bi-lingual edition referred to throughout this chapter, the stanza is rendered: ‘In the night of the
garden,/ six gypsy women/ dance in white.’ Here I have deviated from this translation for obvious reasons.

580
Perhaps something like ‘sky-reaching’ would be better here.
326
/ / ^ / / ^ / · (sus dientes de nácar), which is very interesting in that the eight
beats (counting the final silence) could be broken down into two segments, four and three
beats respectively (not counting the silence), whichs yield the already familiar:
/ / ^ / and a / ^ /; this last rendition is substantiated by the second line of the
next stanza which could be rendered as two identical triplets and two silent beats:
/ ^ / / ^ / · · (escriben la sombra), which is a repetition of the structure of line
three in the first stanza with its two triplets;
/ ^ / / / ^ / · (sus sombras se alargan), which – with its two segments of three
and four beats (not counting the silence at the end) is a wonderful inversion of line two of
the previous stanza (sus dientes de nácar) where the same segments occur in reverse order.
The analysis of the subtle rhythmic variations of what, at first glance, looks like a
schematically repetitive poem could go on almost ad infinitum. I have only isolated the
second lines of each stanza and played them off against each other, but the choice of
second lines was not arbitrary: coming after the first line of each of stanza, which is
identical (with the exception of the added ‘and’ in the last stanza, which is itself worthy
of note in terms of the break from the repetitive pattern which it provides) the second line
is responsible for breaking the rut created by the repetitive first lines of each stanza. But
what a great choice the first lines in themselves are. It is precisely their repetitiveness
which gives the poem a feeling of overriding groove. Instead of absolute chaos, we have
a carefully measured devation from established patterns: a difference which needs
sameness to announce its groovy presence. If one could explore all the connections and
vectors between all lines of this little poem, the result would be a veritable maze of
327
regulated variation. I have already pointed out that the second lines may, in some
instances, be linked to the third lines of different stanzas, and this kind of analysis could
go on. In addition, one could factor in the hard stops of every forth line, the slight
modifications in the grouping of segments, the various effects of pauses, and last but not
least, the effects of individual lines
581
relative to the overall groove of the poem.
In the poem ‘Baile’ (‘Dance’) which comes towards the end of the Poema, the rhythm
is much more staccato and therefore reminiscent of the hard stops of flamenco dancing.
Perhaps baile is a better term than danza in a context where curt and precisely measured
rhythms hold sway. The refrain imitates a typical flamenco footwork figure: a hard stop
followed by a measured silence precedes two equal-length steps:
¡Niñas,
corred las cortinas!

▲ ▲ ▲
could just as easily be rendered as: / / / / / / / / or simply Pa–– Pa-Pa. This is

one of flamenco’s most typical rhythmic figures. The whole poems is composed of curt

rhythms whose imperative is communal emphasis on the same beat with a shared

precision of the plural performer. One can hear the heavy stresses (i.e. the stomping of

feet on the wooden platform of the flamenco dancer) in the following lines:

La Carmen está bailando Carmen is dancing
Por las calles de Sevilla. through the streets of Seville.
Tiene blancos los cabellos White is her hair
Y brillantes las pupilas. And her eyes shine.

¡Niñas, Girls,
corred las cortinas! draw the curtains!

581
Line three in stanza three is a good example; it has its own groove which stands out immediately with its
three (not the usual one or two) stresses: ‘y llegan hasta el cielo.’
328

En su cabeza se enrosca Around her head
una serpiente amarilla, a yellow septent coils.
y va soñando en el baile And as she dances she dreams
con galanes de otros días. of swains of other days.

¡Niñas, Girls,
corred las cortinas! draw the curtains!

Las calles están desiertas The streets are empty.
y en los fondos se adivinan In the deep recesses, hints of
corazones andaluces Andalusian hearts
buscando viejas espinas. searching for old thorns.

¡Niñas, Girls,
corred las cortinas!
582
Draw the curtains!

The whole poem va soñando en el baile as do a lot of other poems by Lorca which seem
to have been directly inspired by flamenco performance. The context of performance is
no less explicit in ‘Balcón’ (‘Balcony’) where ‘La Lola canta saetas’ (sings saetas) while
the barber man (‘barberillo’) keeps time with his head (‘sigue los ritmos con la
cabeza’).
583

Let us see if the flamenco step as it is used by Lorca can be taken to a whole other level,
i.e. to the specifics of a palo. A palo is sub-genre, e.g. the seguiria, or the solea, or the
petenera, or the saeta (to name some of those palos which Lorca used as designations for
his poems). The seguiria is rhythmically the most complicated, and it would be extremely
hard to believe the claim that Lorca would have aimed to replicate its 12-beat rhythmic
cycle exactly. And yet, if we reduce the rhythm of the seguiria to its basic principle, we

582
Op. cit., pp 146-9.

583
Ibid., pp 124.

329
see that Lorca managed quite admirably to produce the seguiria effect in his eponymous
poem. The signature of this sub-genre is the alternation between long and short feet. This
is typical of much of folklore
584
(e.g. Bulgarian folk songs do exactly the same thing with
sometimes exactly the same steps), but the seguiria takes this to a whole other level
where, even to a non-officionado, the undulating sound seems to move in serpentine coils
with an unmistakeable emphasis. This creates a feeling of heaviness even when there are
many notes to a beat. The music moves slowly – in an almost ungainly fashion – until the
coils tied hard somewhere between the two long steps suddenly become untangled in the
two short steps following. The pattern is as follows:
1-2 1-2 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2 1-2.
585
Actually no singer would feel it in two’s and three’s.
Rather, it would be: uno (short) dos (short) tres (long) cuatro (long) cinco (short). The
hands which keep time by clapping linger a little longer on the long steps: sometimes by
rubbing against each other. But as with everything flamenco, this is a measured contact
so that the hands separate just in time. Often, given the notorious sadness of the song, this
rubbing is more like grinding. It is on the long steps that the melody coils the most.
Lorca’s seguria, too, expands and contracts with the uneven steps of the folk singer:
El campo (1short) 1-2 The field
de olivos (2short) 1-2 of olive trees
se abre y se cierra (3 long) 1-2-3 opens and closes
como un abanico. (4 long) 1-2-3 like a fan.
Sobre el olivar
586
(5&1short) 1-2 1-2 Above the olive grove

584
Cf. my discussion above of Yeats’s “man’s first disobedience” and its uneven steps/feet.

585
The last 1-2 is already the first short step of the following cycle.

586
Op. cit., pp 98-9.
330
Of course the point here is not to count exact syllables but to see the general movement
of the poem which se abre y se cierra like a seguiria. It would be difficult to sustain this
kind of beat-counting according to the exact seguiria cycle of 12 beats or alternatively
(and more authentically) of five uneven beats (short, short, long, long, short). There are
several other passages from the ‘Poema de la Siguiriya gitana’ where the exact count of
the poem could be more or less superimposed on the seguiria beat, but that is not the
point. Lorca was not seeking to reproduce the far too complex rhythmic cycle of the song
but to catch its essence. This he did admirably well:
Empieza el llanto The weeping of the guitar
de la guitarra. Begins.
Se rompen las copas The goblets of dawn
de la madrugada. are smashed.
Empieza el llanto The weeping of the guitar
de la guitarra. Begins.
Es inútil Useless
callarla. to silence it.
Es imposible Impossible
callarla. to silence it.
Llora monótona It weeps monotonously
como llora el agua, as water weeps
como llora el viento as the wind weeps
sobre la Nevada. over snowfields.
Es imposible Impossible
callarla. to silence it.

Graphically as well as rhythmically, the lines invoke the undulating sound of the seguiria.
Lorca borrowed other tricks from flamenco performance – for instance, the singer’s
typical inversions within the coplas whereby segments are (playfully) displaced in the
repetition:

331
La muerte entra y sale,
y sale y entra la muerte
de la taberna.
587

In the poem ‘Falseta’ (‘Guitar Riff’), the flamenco ¡Ay! becomes a sustanined
background sound which is picked up across several words, creating the effect of two
voices overlapping, once singing the ay, the other singing the words:
¡Ay, Petenera gitana!
¡Yayay Petenera!
588

The dark o’s of the following stanza in ‘Muerte de la Petenera’ (‘Death of the Petenera’)
are reminiscent of the vibrating sound of the bass string engaged insistently to produce a
hoarse monotone:

Largas sombras afiladas Long, sharp shadows
Vienen del turbio horizonte, come from the dark horizon,
y el bordón de una guitarra and the bass string of the guitar
se rompe.
589
breaks.

Sometimes, the verse seems to have designed to be spoken against a certain acoustic
background containing rhythmic noises.
590
The incantatory quality of the following
strophe comes out even more strongly if we imagine a bell sounding in the background:
Por un camino va Along a road goes
la Muerte, coronada death, wearing a crown
da azahares marchitos. of withered orange blossoms.
Canta y canta She sings and sings

587
Ibid., p. 144. The alternation between ‘a’ and ‘e’ makes this even more effective. If we isolate only the
vowels of this wonderful three-liner we get: a-ue-e e-a i-a-e / i-a-e i-e-a a-ue-e / e-a a-e-a. We are in the
edenic vocalic pre-literary space of the fiesta, i.e. i-e-a.

588
Ibid., p. 130.

589
Ibid., pp 130-1.

590
Carlos Saura’s filmed version of Bodas de Sangre catches this flamenco mentality.

332
una canción a song
en su vihuela blanca, on her white vihuela
y canta y canta y canta.
591
sings and sings and sings.

We see from this excerpt how Lorca could use tired symbols with the new goal of

creating a sonic landscape. Often, this acoustic space is ordered according to the

strict parameters of the flamenco performance. At other times, flamenco sounds are

invited to a more amorphous surrealist space whose resonant intricacy suggests a multi-

layered (“symphonic”) arrangement where sounds collide, overlap, compete with one

another:

Con siete ayes calvados, Pierced by seven ays
¿Dónde irán where will they go,
Los cien jinetes andaluces the one hundred Andalusian horsemen
del naranjal?
592
of the orange grove?

Sometimes the flamenco sound is expressed as a yearning after the unheard:

Entre Italiano Somewhere between Italian
Y flamenco, and flamenco,
¿Cómo cantaría I wonder
aquel Silverio?
593
how Silverio sang?

The Silverio is S. Franconetti (1831 – 1889), a famous singer at a café-cantante. He was a
flamenco legend in his time, and his name still carries weight. Lorca could not have heard
him because Silverio was long dead and was now only passing from mouth to mouth both
as a name and through his songs. The yearning for the (forgotten) sound of the folkloric
tradition is, of course, a common motif in a lot of folk songs.

591
Ibid., pp 132-3.

592
Ibid., pp 126-7.

593
Ibid., pp 136-7.

333
Lorca continues the gallery of flamenco singers as well as his attempt to get at the
specific sound each singer was famous for:
Juan Breva tenía Juan Breva had
cuerpo gigante a giant’s body
y voz de niña. and the voice of a girl.
Nada como su trino.
594
Nothing like his trill.
Many more examples could be multiplied to prove the general point that in Lorca’s
work, the poetic voice yearns to describe sound, and when it comes to the Poema in
particular, this is the sound of the flamenco performance. Even the play of silence and
sound, graphically represented in the measured empty spaces on the page, is part of this
acoustic imperative. I want to end this section with a curious incident involving Juan
Breva which has become part of the bibliographical (or shall we say audiographical)
history of one of Lorca’s poems. Francisco García Lorca tells the story of how Juan
Breva ‘probably discussing the topic of the ephemeral nature of things and the falsity of
success,’ told Federico that ‘everything ended for him with a blanket on the ground.’
595

From this real-life conversation sound-bite, Lorca made a refrain (estribillo) the way a
folk singer would turn a sound-bite or a real-life situation into a folk song. In what way
can we say that this refrain is part of flamenco history? Is it because it appears in the
Poema del cante jondo which, as a whole, interacts in significant ways with the flamenco
tradition, or because the flamenco singer who originated it is in the poem, or because in
Lorca’s poems, like in much of folklore, the thematic and the referential functions
coincide, or is it, finally, becuase the real-life sound-bite was itself akin to the spirit of

594
Ibid., pp 138-9.

595
Cited in Morris, p. 215.
334
many traditional estribillos which Juan Breva would have sung and which would have
influenced his way of talking? The refrain itself is shaped to look like a traditional three-
line flamenco lyric, a bit of distilled speech with an aura of anonymity (I give it in italics):
Vine a este mundo con ojos I came into this world with eyes,
y me voy sin ellos. and leave it without them.
¡Señor del mayor dolor! God of the Greatest Sorrow!
Y luego, And in the end,
un velón y una manta a taper and a blanket
en el suelo. on the floor.

Quise llegar adonde I wanted to get where
Llegaron los buenos. the good people go,
¡Y he llegado, Dios mío!... and, mu God, I did!
Pero luego, But in the end,
un velón y una manta a taper and a blanket
en el suelo. on the floor.

Limoncito amrillo, Little yellow lemon,
Limonero. lemon tree,
Echad los limoncitos throw the lemons
al viento. to the breeze.
¡Ya lo sabéis!... Porque luego, So now you know! For in the end,
luego, the end:
un velón y una manta a taper and a blanker
en el suelo.
596
on the floor.

But what if the whole story of how Lorca heard the words from J. Breva was just a
hoax proliferated after the fact by Lorca’s brother in the interest, say, of institutionalizing
Lorca as a national folk figure. According to a proponent of the invention thesis, that is
precisely what makes it “folklore.” Since, in the case of Yeats, I have, to an extent,
agreed with some parts of the invention thesis, I should perhaps place this objection a la
Hobsbawm in the list of reasons why the refrain is part of flamenco history. Folklore

596
Ibid., pp 142-3. I owe the reference to the incident and its part in the making of Lorca’s refrain to Brian
Morris.
335
includes in its broad lifecycles things like inventions and artificial imitations. The
existence of copies does not make the whole thing a copy, however. Indeed, the fact that
there are imitations seems to indicate that there is something to imitate.
Quite apart from this consideration, a response to the inventionist’s skepticism would
be to direct the readerly ear to the last repetition of ‘luego’. What a delightful little trick
which directly recalls, even today, a flamenco singer’s improvised repetition during
performance. The imperative ¡Ya lo sabéis! could be seen as part of this improvised
addition. In some cases, the singing voice would adopt a different pitch to stress the
importation, into the texture of the song, of this alien/external voice which has an
interjectional quality. In this way, the singer reframes the whole song: the interjection is
also a self-referential meta-statement. More simply, this could be seen as an apostrophe
directed to the audience to let it get in on the act.
Geo Milev and vernacular expression
A kind of Lorca figure in the Bulgarian canon, Geo Milev (1895 – 1925) is perhaps the
poet who has come in the most direct contact with the fickle fate of scholarly fashion.
During the communist era, critical opinion placed Milev in a larger framework of
nationalist co-option. He functioned as a prime example, within the context of the history
of Bulgarian literature, of an error committed by experimental modernists. Having turned
their backs on the national spirit (which can presumably crystallize only in realist and
some symbolist works), modernists indulged in a literary prodigality before the course of
literary history intervened to purge this erroneous impulse and to return Bulgarian
336
literature within the fold of realism. Geo Milev was not around to participate in this
‘return to realism’ of the 1930s when the modernist impulse was supposedly exhausted.
Surely, literary theory claims as well as estranges the heroes of its own tradition. A
second version of the literary criticism under the communist dispensation sees Geo Milev
as an anti-fascist poet and hastens to co-opt both his works and his tragic death under the
rubric of progressive literature. While the first critical narrative tells the story of the
progress of Bulgarian literature from realism (end of the 19th/turn of the 20th century)
through the distracted gropings of modernism (roughly the 1920s) and back again to a
more enlightened version of realism, seen as an after-modernism (1930s), the second
version establishes a “natural” continuity among the phases based on a loosely
constructed thematic framework which is designed to answer to a nationalist agenda and
functions on the principle of minimal contrariety.
597
Amazingly, in this critical maze, Geo
Milev roamed more or less freely, refusing to be dragged on either side of the critical tug-
of-war. In recent years, Bulgarian scholarship has embarked on a reappraisal of the place
of this poetic rebel who still cannot be unambiguously claimed by a school, movement or
faction. Still a wanderer, Geo Milev has been unable to find a resting place in the
hierarchy of literary evaluation as his reputation has once again soared during what we
may call his “post-communist” phase. Most recently, he has graciously been left to his
own devices – a refusal to define him has gone hand in hand with a celebration of his
many-faceted intellectual profile.

597
Based on this principle of censorship, a literary critic was not allowed to diverge too much from state
ideology.
337
In a sense, this gesture is the most natural since the poet himself is a prime example of
telescoped development: having started out as a symbolist, he wrote furiously within a
short creative span of ten years, embracing his own version of expressionism – a version
which is nonetheless informed by the legacy of his symbolist years. As often happens in
smaller cultures looking to emulate intellectual centers, different currents coalesce, and
what one gets in the final analysis is a mix of schools. Attacking the “realist” bedrock –
against which many of the moderns communally rebelled – Geo Milev aimed to reshape
the cultural map of a young state through dedicated work as foremost theoretician of
Bulgarian modernism, translator and navigator of the European literary and cultural
currents, practitioner of the rebellious trade of writing against the dominant taste. Like
Lorca, he paid with his life at he hands of the Fascists.
His theoretical position on folklore is somewhat nebulous even as his poetic practice is
rooted in the tradition of the Bulgarian folk song. On the one hand, he virulently
denounced the narrow conception of ‘own’ (i.e. patriotic) literature which had as its aim
the description of the national ethos (e.g. peasant culture with its folkloric paraphernalia),
and on the other he made no secret of his debt to the poetics of the age-long tradition of
folk singing in Bulgaria. Like other modernists (Yavorov, Slaveikov, Trayanov), Geo
Milev looked to Hristo Botev, who had been one of the pioneers in the creation of a
poetic idiom based on the folk song. Milev’s expressionist rendering of traditional
materials has already received some attention (most recently in Maya Gorcheva’s Icons
Asleep: the Metamorphoses of the modern soul, 2006). The usual move is to see his six-
piece poetic “suite” as an explosion of the tradition of the folk song. Within an
338
expressionist framework, his terse citations of actual folk songs are said to function as a
reference to the folkloric tradition. He is often seen as borrowing motifs (e.g. the Zmey, a
mythic creature of the dragon family) and placing them in a modern setting with the aim
of expressing viscerally his personal reaction to contemporary events. By and large,
commentators agree that the icons (symbols of traditional culture) are asleep and cannot
help assuage the tragedy of an expressionistically horrendous reality. The folk song
becomes a futile scream before the tragic catastrophe.
But how exactly do folk materials function within the context of Geo Milev’s avant-
gardist experimentalism? In what sense can one say that his expressionist poetry is
vernacular? To answer these questions, I will examine not Icons (the usual target when
the issue of folklore is brought up) but Geo Milev’s crowning achievement, the long
expressionist poem ‘September’. The popular folkloric genre which haunts this poem is
the football chant, which is an example of urban folklore and is, in some sense, a
quintessential instantiation of the vernacular (in the sense of a down-at-elbows, minor
genre). The science of folkloristics has not yet talked about the football chant, although it
has examined things like playground chants, military chants, party songs fitted to popular
tunes, and a whole slew of other urban folkloric genres. In what way is the football chant
folklore?
First and foremost, the football chant is, like much of folklore, an anonymous creation
which travels by word of mouth (i.e. the chain of transmission is identical to that of most
other folk genres). It has its own lifecycles which reflect the wider culture in question –
e.g., in the UK, the football chant has become implicated with popular culture (for
339
instance in the use of pop tunes which carry the words). It has its own historical moments,
its own dynamism and generic specifications. It possesses what folklorists call
“indexical” meaning, and in that sense it often carries a coded message over and above
the meaning of its words. Its modes of composition are traditional and entail the presence
of a lot of variation (a condition which is typical of folklore as a whole). It has things like
oicotypes, laws of patterning, formulaic rules of composition, etc. It is itself highly
chronotopical and an excellent candidate for a subject of study in the debate about
diffusionism. Surprisingly enough, the terrace chant has also a deserved but altogether
neglected place in the study of modernist poetics. That Geo Milev not only knew about
this inconsequential cultural excrescence, but actually incorporated its expressionistic
dynamism within his own poetry is evident from a cursory glance of his poem
‘September’, which has lines obviously designed to be chanted as well as lines which can
profitably be sounded as crowd chants. But before one can make claims about the ways in
which this particular folk genre mixes with Geo Milev’s poetics, it is necessary to
examine (1) his theoretical vision of what modern(ist) poetry should, and does, consist in
and (2) the specific qualities of the football chant which make it a target for appropriation
by “high modernism”.
Articles of a poetic faith
During his convalescence in Berlin (1917-8)
598
, Geo Milev traipsed around town in
attendance at concerts, exhibitions, cinema screenings, theater performances, libraries,

598
Taking part as a lieutenant in WWI, he was injured on the Macedonian front. The plastic surgeon’s
verdict was that the eye, injured by a shell bomb, would need two more years to heal. Geo Milev decided
not to wait and returned to Bulgaria to preach the new art. He grew a fringe of hair to cover the injured eye.
340
and museums. Himself a painter, he was intimately acquainted with the works of the Der
Sturm and Aktion circles. From a distance, he directed the publication of the Vezni
magazine – a Bulgarian manifesto of the new tendencies in European art. Geo confessed
to his father:
Now, something new is being born in literature and in all the arts. I want to be
its herald. Nobody in Bulgarian knows as well as I do symbolism, expressionism,
futurism. These are new movements. A bomb thrown in the bosom of old culture.
The young ones will walk with me.
599

In Bulgaria, he started his feverish work directing theater (Strindberg and others),
translating ancient Greek, German, French, English, American, Belgian, and Russian
authors
600
, writing articles, reviews, prose and poetry, attending meetings and playing a
vital role within intellectual circles. The overall goal was to bring Bulgarian culture up to
date. His intellectual journeys included England, Spain, France, Russia, and Belgium. His
close affinity with French and Russian symbolism, German expressionism, the earthy
spirit of Whitman, and the Bulgarian literary and folkloric traditions helped him create a
highly hybridized poetic oeuvre where “phases” overlap and intersect in a furiously
accelerated and telescoped development.
601

599
Tanev, Dimitar, and Andrey Andreev, Geo Milev through the prism of literary history and criticism,
Sofia, 2005, p. 11.

600
The translations include works by Eurepedes, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Byron, Whitman, Verlaine,
Nietzche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Rilke, Verhaern, Bloc, Mayakovski, and others.

601
John Foster points to a similar tendency in Irish literature: ‘Wilson’s distinction between romanticism
and symbolism has limited application to Irish revival literature, in which nationalism of a peculiarly
emblematic kind and a potent folklore cloud the issue, and in which symbolism and romanticism frequently
coexist and commingle.’ (Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival. A Changeling Art, Syracuse University
Press, Gill and Macmillan, 1987, p. 92)
341
After the literary magazine Vezni ceased publication due to financial constraints, its
successor Plamuk (edited by Milev) became a loud clarion call to literary and cultural
innovation. The poem ‘September’ appeared for the first time in this periodical.
602
As is
often the case in peripheral cultures aware of the minority of their literatures, the sense of
urgency and missionary zeal is an ever-present component in the critical writings of the
period as the builders of national literature attempt to translate new aesthetic principles
and to relate these to a consciously adopted mission of moving the local culture forward.
Forward! The sense of rivalry and teamwork, the emphasis on producing desired results,
the zealous drive to create opportunistic chances, to be ahead, the sense of spectacle, of
being watched, the sound of encouragement, the boos, the careful strategic planning –
these are some of the crucial features which cast Bulgarian modernism as a kind of
competitive public event.
The dynamism of Milev’s articles in which he expounds the new aesthetic program is
itself expressionistic.
***
For years, the Bulgarian people has been slowly and darkly cloistered in some
damp, cold castle –without the sun to look at, without space in front of its eyes,
with no creative impulse in its spirit, faithless, directionless. Besieged by so-
called “freedom” – for so many years now, – trapped by those who have its
destiny in their hands. Today, this situation is intensified to the utmost degree…
Today the spirit of dejection is universal, unbearable … Today the Bulgarian

602
The first two decades of the 20th century saw an explosion of maganizes and newspapers, some of
which were solely devoted to literature and the arts. Heated debates among various literary schools and
movements happened on the pages of these publications. Geo Milev contributed with numerous articles,
reviews, and opinion pieces. Maya Gorcheva has studiously documented his critical activity (‘Geo Milev’s
name in periodicals up to and including Vezni. Fragments’, in Electronic Magazine LiterNet, 26.05.2006,
№ 5 (78)).

342
creative impulse is frozen to a deathly zero on the thermometer of the spirit…
The air hangs heavy and suffocating around us. Is there no liberating bolt of
lightning? Will a purging storm not begin to rage?
603

At this crucial historical juncture, between WWI and the fateful September uprising,
Geo Milev sensed that salvation would be a miracle. Bulgarian culture was going
nowhere as the high ideals of the Liberation heroes had given way to political blindness,
senseless destruction and spiritual drought. The much needed rejuvenation of the nation’s
spirit could come only in a laborious and painful, but necessary, process of unleashing the
creative energies of the people who already felt deeply estranged from the ruling elites.
The people should work out their salvation daily in small acts of sincere labor. ‘Sincerity
and Labor!’ was Geo Milev’s proposed slogan.
604

Popular culture, with its cheap imitations of the truly creative spirit of the Liberation
era, could not be the answer. Institutionalized art had lowered itself to the service of
mundane entertainment even as it masqueraded, under the rhetorical screen of partisan
agendas, as “national” art. A truly national art could only spring from the deep source of
the individual creator’s spirit. To the extent to which the creative artist partook of the
common, and unconscious, source of the nation’s cultural heritage, his/her art would be
national. Once the national element became conscious (as was the case with realist art
proscribed by a centralized ideological apparatus), it ceased being national and became
nationalist. (Hence, Geo Milev’s astringent criticism of the acting program of the

603
‘The Bulgarian People Today’, in Vezni, Sofia, 1921.

604
This is very similar to Lukàcs’s view of revolution conceived as a series of small acts in the everyday
life of the individual.
343
Bulgarian National Theatre, which only promoted dramas dealing with local/regional
subjects depicting the life of the peasant, glorifying the Bulgarian soldier, etc.) There was
no place for experimentation in institutionalized art as true artistic spirits were forced to
congregate in isolated coteries in the ivory tower.
To add salt to the deep wound in Bulgarian culture, a great number of the less popular
literati (called “youths” by critics with prestige) were hiding under the comfortable
blanket of “high” artistic ideals (which, in the worst cases, meant epigonic imitation of
foreign fashions). Only a handful of artists (a small pocket of resistance) barely eked out
a living but held firm their conviction that art was not to be cheapened by an appeal to
popular taste. Interestingly, in this context Geo Milev does not seek the remedy in the
coteries. Instead, salvation would come from the people. They needed ‘to break the seal
of the hidden cache’ where their energy lay dormant. The artist, by implication, had to
escape from the musty cell of isolation and become one with the people – in small acts of
sincere labor. The people themselves would see the value of his/her labor if the artist
truly dedicated him/herself to a high artistic goal. In Milev’s view, they already cared
little for institutionalized art. They could feel the fatigue which had beset the ‘bourgeois’
school of poetry with its diaphanous, mellifluous, calm, numbingly soothing verses which
followed ossified formulas.
605
The people only had to be shown a better way…

605
This type of poetry had its day (’15-20 years ago’) when Bulgarian literature was seeking its own idiom,
when it was finding its own modes of expression. At that time, it was excusable. But ‘today’ (i.e. c. 1920),
the new generation hatched poetry which was ‘easy’; it followed hand-me-down formulas according to
predictable patterns; it used exhausted metaphors strung together to form a musical line. (‘The Poetry of the
Young Ones’, in Plamuk)

344
A truly national art would not celebrate provincial/regional culture taken in isolation. It
would be eager to receive education from outside. It would become part of the culture of
the world just as Bulgaria could no longer pretend to be an isolated backwater estranged
from global events. The underlying, unconscious substratum of national culture would
guarantee that a heartfelf/spiritual art was national.
606
The individual artist (no longer
isolated) had to look inside, and there he/she would see the yearning of the people for
rejuvenation. Spiritual art was also national. By expressing the innermost emotions, the
artist was already in tune with the voice of the people which had been forcefully silenced
for so many years.
607

But what should the high modernist do when ‘the people’ cannot understand difficult
poetry? Should one compromise? Geo Milev stood firmly on the side of experimentation
and innovation – away from the deadly realism of institutional art.
608
His solution was not
to look away from the people but to harness their vernacular energies in his own poetry.
In many senses, the voice in poems like ‘September’ is the plural anonymous voice of the
crowd. As long as a poem had energy, it was using an idiom which the people could
comprehend, even when poetic form was difficult. The dynamism of this vernacular
energy was, if anything, more palpably present in the fragment – the form which, for
Milev, was the essence of modernist poetry. ‘The fragment is a child of the new art’, it is

606
‘Our Own Art’, in Vezni, vol. 11, 1920.

607
‘Appeal to the Bulgaria Writer’, in Vezni, vol. 11, 1920.

608
‘Against Realism’, in Slance, vol. 5., 1919.

345
‘dark for those whose souls are dark’
609
, for those who can only understand facts. But the
people need no facts, no naturalist plot, no logical analysis. They can only respond to a
synthesis (in the fragment) of sincere energy.
610

The fragment used ‘a minimum of resources’; it did not explain, it synthesized spiritual
meaning. In painting, for instance, a minimum of resources meant a non-descriptive use
of colors. Each color corresponded to an emotion. To depict death, for example, the
painter should not draw a skeleton clothed in black but would use a mix of colors. The
minimalist method translated in the field of poetry not as a pithy, sententious proverb or
philosophical aphorism but as an expression of intuitive meaning which followed the
mechanism of association. Expressionism was a synthesis of hidden intuitions using the
basic materials available to the artist: words, colors, clay, notes. Since music was the least
referential of the arts, it was expressive art par excellence.
611
Poetry was to become a
kind of musical expression using minimal means.
Art needed a scream, not analysis. A return to the people meant the expression, in
fragmentary form, of the people’s fragmented soul. Since national life itself was
dislocated, a painter who drew a Bulgarian village was no more national than someone
who distilled, in color, his/her own heartfelt response to social and spiritual

609
‘The Fragment’, in Vezni, vol. 4, 1919.

610
The issue of Plamuk in which ‘September’ (with its fragments) first appeared was quickly sold out. Geo
Milev was sentenced to death on the score of sedition based largely on his reputation as the author of the
“anti-government” poem.

611
‘Music and the other Arts’, in Vezni, Sofia, 1923.

346
dislocations
612
. A poet, for his part, had to do away with pretty metaphors and instill raw
energy into the language of poetry. ‘Minimal resources’, in this context, means: sounds,
distilled energetic language, drive, pulsion, rhythm, the ‘semiotic’
613
dimension (which is
‘before signification’), mother tongue.
Crude. Raw. Barbaric. But new. Bulgarian poetry needs to be barbaricized – by
the raw juices with their primitive life. They will give it life… Tired of so many
gentlemen in ironed and groomed black costumes, so many poets with pale
visages, melancholy eyes and wan smiles, we want to see today barbarians,
hooligans, hoodlums – with fire in their eyes and with iron teeth. Barbarians – a
new race that will give new blood to Bulgarian poetry.
614

There’s only one – the People
The first Bulgarian poet to write a football poem was – Geo Milev!
615
In 1922, he
dedicated a march song to FC Atletik (Football Club). The chorus of this march can
roughly be translated as:
Onward, forward
Our Blood –
Embers of fire and stars.
Onward in the fray
Forever ahead
Be fearless and ever ahead
616

612
Kandinsky’s non-figurative, minimalist art (which Milev knew well) is in a sense a return to folk origins.
In his theory of art, Kandinsky makes this connection himself. He describes a visit to a Russian village
where he was impressed with the intensity of the colors in folk art. Using basic means, the folk had
expressed a whole lot. Milev openly admitted his debt to the expressionist school of painting. His
theoretical writings echo Kandinsky’s aesthetic theory expounded in On the Spiritual in Art and Point and
Line to Plane.

613
Julia Kristeva’s term.

614
‘The Poetry of the Young Ones’, in Plamuk, Sofia, 1924.

615
In Collected Works, Vol. 1: The Sunflowers Turned Their Eyes to the Sun, eds Leda Mileva and Petar
Velchev, Zahari Stoyanov: Sofia, 2006, p. 86.

616
A member of the football club, Geo Milev wrote the poem ‘March’, which was the club’s hymn. Atletic
Sports Club was established in 1910. In 1923, the club merged with FC Slava to form FC AS-23 (Atletic-
347
There is little in these lines, which suggests lyrical potential. But there is much else in a
chanted football poem.
***
On the train from Birmingham to York, I recognized a fellow passenger covered by the
familiar red and white. He too was bound for the Stadium of Light. We talked shop for a
while and then I asked if he had any chants he could spare. I was an outsider, or rather a
newcomer, intent on learning the lingo of the terrace. The “lads” were playing at home,
yet my long pilgrimage – whose origin must be traced to an obscure sense of triumph at
the unlikely T.V. coverage of the manhandling of a bigger club – felt like having come
from far away to a site of self-imposed exile. Did the man in red-and-white sense this?
Did he also feel “away”? The chant he offered celebrated the relative superiority of the
football ground I was about to see. The ‘black cats’ sing this away chant to a team with a
small ground:
my garden shed,
is bigger than this,
my garden shed is bigger than this,
its got a door and a window,
my garden shed is bigger than this
(Tune: Saints Go Marchin In )

I had lusted after this acoustic spectacle, and now was the time to come within reach of
some real verbal dynamite. My first Sunderland chant! My first stepping inside the
folkloric chain of transmission... Little did I care that this particular rhyme was not going

Slava 23). First published as ‘one unknown work by Geo Milev’ by Pencho Penev in Literaturen Front
(Literary Front), Vol. 5, 6 Oct. 1945, this unstudied and unmentioned poem appears in a vernacular location
in the Collected Poems ensconced as it is between its more notable neighbors, the expressionist poems
‘Nightmare’ and Icons Asleep.
348
to feature on the Saturday afternoon. It was for me a password into a catacomb of
noise.
617

The vernacular logic of inverted syntax
A footie song, a terrace chant, or simply a chant, the football song-poem is a special
genre of vernacular lyric. In its explosive vulgarity, it bears a relation to the curse. Like
the charm, it is designed to change the course of events or bring about a desired outcome.
An explosive voiceover, the chant is a symbolic absurdity. Semiotically (in Kristeva’s
sense of the term), it communicates its point the way a charm does: it inhabits a median
space (it is itself a medium) between language and the material world. Its vocal mass
serves the purpose of giving universal form to a manifold of desires by pretending that
the result it sings about is as natural as daylight. By conjuring up a possible world side by
side with the real, it is a recipe for a drunkenness of the intellect. A concoction of items
with a re-applied relevance, the chant has a world-disclosing function whose magic
power is expressed in the phrase ‘twelfth man’.
618
Like a disgruntled Aladdin, the stock-
in-trade lyricism of the crowd reappears in familiar guise whose effectiveness remains
beyond doubt. From imaginary crowns to impossible acts of ill-will, the stuff of chants is
evocative of the pharmaceutical over-determination of the magic incantation:
Build a bonfire
build a bonfire
put the boro on the top

617
Folklore’s chain of transmission often involves the passing of items from person to person in the
informal way which this narrative describes; in this sense as well, folklore is a password.

618
The twelfth man is the home crowd; in its dedicated vocality, it rounds out the eleven players on the
pitch so that a magic completeness is reached.

349
put the maggies in the middle
and then burn the whole lot.
619

The logic of this charming species of lyric consists in its inversion of the thematic
aspect of communication. The theme is the familiar, its logical place in a sentence is at
the beginning. A rheme is a piece of new information, a development of the theme.
620

The charm and the chant both sidestep the primacy of the theme. The familiar is
dismissed as irrelevant or very changeable: a deep-felt conviction of the possibility of
another world explodes the thematic first thought in order to revel in the dispersal of its
smoke. Thus, the chant is always the bearer of a new reality: its condition of possibility is
always as a harbinger of a new spring.
621
The repetition of the charm does not allow it to
lose its magic power but enforces it. Like the repeated sounding aimed at bringing out
from obscurity a hard-to-process bit of language, the chant straightens reality by ironing
out ontological inconsistencies. It does this by calling to memory past libidinal ties
attached to bits of speech. In this sense, the chants possess a kind of jazz quality since the
new usage belongs to an impromptu context. It is a characteristic privilege of vernacular
poetry to be a theme-jumper.

619
‘Boro’ for Middlesboro FC; ‘maggies’ or ‘magpies’ or ‘geordies’ for Newcastle United, FC
Sunderland’s arch-rival. Often a team’s biggest satisfaction is to do better than its rival. Thus, after an
unsuccessful season, Everton’s coach breathed a public sigh of relief by pointing to the fact that even
though the club finished in the bottom half of the table, Everton did the double on Liverpool and that saved
the season.

620
Linguists no longer use these terms. Currently, they talk about ‘topic’.

621
The seasonal reoccurrence of chants foregrounds this: e.g. there are special chants for the occasion of
one team’s visiting another team each year. A favorite histrionic gesture of West Ham United fans is the
blowing of their historic bubbles. The reply by some opposition fan groups to this symbolic theme is a
seasonal chant: ‘You can stick your bubbles up you’re a*se.’
350
The syntax of its logic, like that of the chant/charm, obeys the principle of privileging
the rheme. The theme (springing from the head) is allayed the way effervescent aspirin
chases away a headache. It already introduces the rheme in the act of effervescence, an
inseparable part of whose utility is its functioning as a placebo. Each new headache is a
memory of past ones but also a drastically topical variation on a familiar theme. In this
sense, the chant’s topic is always a rheme: ‘I have a headache’ really means, in this case,
‘A headache which I can beat is temporarily had by me.’ The headache loses to the ‘I’
since, as a rheme, it can be turned around in a variety of possible worlds which may or
may not square with the immediate reality.
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The Edenic plural anon
The chant’s motivation lies in the exact moment of its utterance. This makes the chant
an effective speech act which not only states but also performs. It is not meant to be
meaningful but to function as a gesture. As a speech act, it can provoke, stir, put down,
smother, brush aside, glorify, jubilate, motivate, deafen.
In spite of this, there seems to be an Edenic quality to this species of vernacular
expression. This springs from the social context in which the chants originate. In their
simplicity, the chants carry echoes of a primitive language game where words are used to
point to the thing present or to the action performed. Their impulsive nature is closely

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This principle of thematic subsumption under the rheme is especially pronounced in cases where the
chant is a simple documentation of the score (e.g. ‘One-nil to the Arsenal’: in this case it is ‘the Arsenal’
which is the constant theme and the ‘one-nil’ which is the new reality; viewed more globally, the obvious
topical reference, i.e. the change of the score, begins to lose its significance as mere fact and becomes a
tease: ‘You are kindly reminded that it is one-nil to the Arsenal and who knows what will happen
presently!’ )

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connected to the ability to respond in kind as promptly as occasion requires. In this ready-
to-discharge context, familiarity with the tradition is particularly helpful.
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To accede to the status of a participant in the primitive language game of the chant, one
requires the ontological trappings of belonging to the chanting crew: a kind of chanter’s
passport. Credentials in this hermetic space of vocal shorthand are both ready-to-hand
and difficult to come by. One has the option to chant along by following the letter of the
game’s law; a more ‘authentic’ type of participation is to come into the game with a
certain amount of libidinal motivation; a third – both more free and more bound –
alternative is to invest one’s own libidinal content into the chanted bits of language. In
any event, whatever the alternative chosen, the experience of the chanting game will
include submission to the principle of the plural anon.
Handed down by tradition, chant forms are given content in the very act of speaking.
This suggests a condition of possibility for vernacular poetry which is embedded in the
communal experience of the speech act. Performed out loud for an audience, the poetic
speech act begins to lose its connection with the material space of the printed page. It
becomes ephemeral and always impromptu. Its aesthetic effect is similar to that of music
which calls forth ideas in the act of enunciation through the medium of pure sound.

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An Irish joke tells of a busful of workers who travel together to their workplace every day. To entertain
themselves, they tell jokes – except, after long use, the joke is no longer told but simply referred to by a
number. A stranger gets on the bus and begins to watch this verbal spectacle. He hears numbers being
called out and laughter ensuing. He asks his neighbor for the explanation. The neighbor tells him that each
number represents a joke, so that what he hears are no mere numbers but jokes with a long history of telling.
Since everyone on the bus is familiar with the contents of the joke, there is no need to tell the whole story.
Encouraged by the seeming ease with which one can jump on this humorous bandwagon, the first-timer
butts in by calling out a random number. Silence follows. Surprised, he asks his neighbor for the
explanation. Perhaps there is no joke corresponding to that particular number? Yes there is, the neighbor
informs him, but that number’s turn to be called out does not come until much later.
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Perhaps a reading of poetry could benefit from the chant form: for instance, a poetry
reading could be staged following the rules of the terrace.
Viewed from the perspective of the speaking plural anon, the poetic voice becomes a
kind of objectified echo. This sense of estrangement arises from the feeling of the subject
being spoken through by the voice of the community (acoustics bears out this conclusion:
it is rather difficult to hear one’s own voice while participating in the chant; a
compromise or an exultation in self-effacement, the chant’s voice is the sum of subjective
erasures, which is the essence of the plural anon, and perhaps of community in general).
The sound of it
Like avant-gardist sound poetry, this verbal excess makes a point which is difficult to
capture with a paraphrase. It exemplifies the semiotic cutting through the symbolic. Pared
down to its essential elements, it is beat, melody, howl, buzz: pure sound. Meaning here
is accidental: an ornament. And yet, to be topical, the chant requires referential
meaning.
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To make sense of the reality (both what is happening on the pitch and the
message of the opponent fans), the chant must first process it symbolically and then
express its choric judgment – as a satiric Roman laughing at a naïve Greek.
Not only does the semiotic cut through the symbolic, it also overtops it. A chant is
always designed as a step in the process of erecting a monument: along the way, some

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E.g.‘Going down!’ sung to a team about to be relegated to a lower league does sound good if the other
team is really going down; the German fans picked up on that aspect of the tradition when they chanted in
English the standard jeer ‘You are shit and you know it!’ at Wembley .

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chants may address a team’s favorite players or coach,
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hurl insults at the referee, stall
the opponent’s offense, or simply respond to a previous chant: to keep the vocal ball
going seems to be the main purpose of the chanting crew.
The chanting tradition as collect