A Temper of Misgiving: W. B. Yeats and the Ireland of Synge’s Time

This essay explores how W. B. Yeats was defined in the early twentieth century not just by his own work, but in his public representation of J. M. Synge’s. It suggests that as Yeats’s view on nationalism hardened in his defence of Synge, particularly in the context of his death, it became detached from change: frozen until the American tour of 1912 delivered a jolt of reassessment, then amplified by the shock of 1916. Examining his 1911 essay ‘J. M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’, his 1923 Nobel lecture, and the journals later published as Estrangement and The Death of Synge, it is suggested that Yeats came to construe the construction of identity—his own and Ireland’s—as forms of masked performance. In the shift from certainty to reassessment lie the origins of doubt as a core aspect of Yeats’s later theatre, politics, and poetry.