‘We Irish’ in Europe: Yeats, Berkeley and Joseph Hone

W.B. Yeats went to great lengths to design his self-image which biographers have been slow to challenge. Following on from Blood Kindred (2005), Mc Cormack’s new study of the poet’s idealist views concentrates on the role of J.M. Hone in introducing him to George Berkeley’s philosophy in the mid 1920s and to contemporary Italian thinkers such as Giovanni Gentile and Mario Manlio Rossi. The notion of sacrifice is examined and, by way of contrast, work by Synge, George Moore and Samuel Beckett is shown to challenge the demand for sacrifice which underlies many powerful philosophies of culture. This is a detailed and yet wide-ranging critique of twentieth-century Irish literature, illuminating both well-known and obscure figures.