Diplomat

Abstract

Chapter 2 explores how W. B. Yeats’s 1903–4 US lecture tour placed the poet in the role of diplomat. It demonstrates how this position required Yeats to engage in a kind of racial performance directed toward markedly political ends. In taking on this diplomatic function, Yeats was tasked with mediating the tensions of a changing imperial landscape. He became a representative for a country with a long history of anti-colonialism at the same time that America was awakening to its own imperial future. With these tensions in mind, this chapter attends to Yeats’s efforts to bring Ireland and America into productive contact with one another. In particular, it examines his early lectures at US colleges and universities, where he sought to establish an emotional connection with his audiences by channeling the voice of ancient Irish bards. It also shows how this was a project that sometimes backfired on the poet, as these bardic displays made it easy for Americans to exoticize Yeats when he moved into larger cultural arenas like Carnegie Hall and the St Louis World’s Fair. Yet, in the end, Yeats’s emotional diplomacy did prove highly successful when it came to connecting him with Irish American political groups, which suggests that the US lecture tour was instrumental in teaching the poet how to speak to his own countrymen.