Ghosts and Roger Casement in the Work of W.B. Yeats: A Paper and a Post-Script
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v12i0.3574Abstract
W.B. Yeats first summoned the 1916 patriot Roger Casement as one of the unnamed heroes in his poem “Sixteen Dead Men” which appeared in his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). He returned to Casement late in his career when, having read with sympathy William J. Maloney’s The Forged Casement Diaries (1936), the poet returned to Casement in three poems in his late New Poems (1938): “Roger Casement,” “The Ghost of Roger Casement” and “The Municipal Gallery Revisited.” Yeats makes his case that Casement was libeled in “Roger Casement”; he describes the figure of Casement in Sir John Lavery’s painting of the trial. “The Ghost of Roger Casement,” Yeats’s most dramatic Casement poem, describes Casement’s ghost’s return to
beat on the door and to indict John Bull. The image of the returned ghost of Roger Casement made the poem popular with fellow Dubliners after it was published in The Irish Press (February 2, 1937). This essay will examine Yeats’s use of ghost tradition in Irish folklore in his early poems and plays and his return to that ghost lore in the Casement poems in New Poems.
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