Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Macdiarmid, and Jones by Gregory Baker (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Macdiarmid, and Jones by Gregory Baker
• Nathan Wallace (bio)

CLASSICS AND CELTIC LITERARY MODERNISM: YEATS, JOYCE, MACDIARMID, AND JONES, by Gregory Baker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xxiv + 299 pp. $99.99 cloth, ebook.

In his introduction to Classics and Celtic Literary Modernism, Gregory Baker explains that he is using a "narrative historicist" mode of critical writing, which relies heavily on storytelling and dense historical contextualization (xv). It would be better, according to Baker, to avoid generalizations that obscure the specific pathways by which "Classics" have been received and passed down from ancient times to our own. He is a good storyteller, too. Baker can deftly render the situation and draw us into it, and he demonstrates this skill in every section of the book. These are well researched and well told stories, and, while reading this book, I often felt I was reading excerpts from an intellectual biography or a series of biographical essays.

Speaking of avoiding generalizations, however, I would have recommended some term other than "Celtic Literary Modernism." It sounds like Baker might be suggesting that W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, David Jones, and Hugh MacDiarmid belonged to a coherent literary movement, and that does not sound right to me. Even the term "Celt" is controversial nowadays, at least among pre-historians.

Baker demonstrates that the term Classics is extremely wide-ranging in its possible referents. It could mean simply references to anything Ancient Greek or Ancient Roman, whether literary, linguistic, political, or historical. These references are common in political rhetoric as well as in the everyday conversation of highly educated people. The most important definition for Baker's study is the academic discipline of Classical Studies itself, a discipline which was being displaced by Departments of English in the British, American, and Irish educational systems during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth [End Page 177] centuries. I am not convinced that this development in education has had as much of an impact on the development of Irish Nationalism and Irish Modernism as Baker suggests, but he does point to a larger number of connections than I would have imagined. Among the authors surveyed, Yeats has the most to say about this coincidence and explicitly comments that this is an important thing. How important the decline of Classics was, compared to the many other elements Yeats said were important to the development of his own literary and political ideas, is another matter.

For Classicists interested in how the Classics have been received by these modern writers, Baker's narrative historicist approach should be very instructive. From an Irish Studies perspective, however, the stories Baker tells us about Yeats and John Milington Synge and Joyce, and their contexts, are not particularly new. In his chapter on Yeats's translation of Sophocles's Oedipus the King,¹ we learn all about how Yeats's arrangements to get a translation of Oedipus written for the Abbey Theater fell through, and how he finally put together his own translation even though he did not know Greek. Then we hear that Yeats's mature aesthetics were developed in some ways from this process. This is not a new story, and it has been debated in many ways, but Baker does not tell us about these prior arguments, and so his statements about the fact that a change happened are not as satisfying (to me) as a critical analysis of that change. In his chapter on Joyce's "Mistranslation of Revival," Baker's take on Buck Mulligan's knowledge of Greek in the "Telemachus" episode is new, but his long explanation of Irish Revivalist translator-ese, and how Joyce parodies it in "Cyclops" with his own translator-ese, is not new. Perhaps the new ideas would shed new light on the old ones, but Baker's stories are so detailed, and his contextualization is so thorough that I have a hard time locating the argument.

I cannot speak as well to what one would normally expect from a monograph on Jones or MacDiarmid, but I would guess that what Baker has to say about them reflects more innovative research than what we see...