Beckett in Yeats’s Ghost (Ire)land

Abstract

This paper examines Beckett’s engagement with Ireland in terms of his creative responses to Yeats at three distinctive stages of Beckett’s literary career: his early critique of Yeats in “Recent Irish Poetry” (1934), All That Fall (1957), a radio play that recreates the Protestant landscape of 1920s’ Dublin, and . . . but the clouds . . . (1977), a teleplay that murmurs a phrase from Yeats’s poem. “The Tower” is the poetic nexus that holds together tenuous threads of Beckett’s relationship with and perception of Ireland. What emerges from this study is that Beckett’s complex relationship with Ireland is significantly mediated by Yeats’s spectral presence. Yeats’s presence in Beckett takes a spectral form because Yeats is a spiritual medium and cultural intermediary through which Beckett finds his fragile affiliation with Ireland. For Beckett, Ireland was Yeats’s ghost land.