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W.B. Yeats's final title for his poem "september 1913" creates two different contexts for current readers, depending on whether they are irish or foreign. For most foreign readers of the collected poems, the date signifies little beyond a year before the start of World War i. But for most irish readers the title signifies a critical month in the greatest strike and lockout in irish history-a confrontation between organized labor led by the fiery James Lar- kin and dublin employers led by the determined railroad magnate and newspaper owner William martin murphy. that context adds a whole level of meaning to such famous phrases as "Romantic ireland's dead and gone," "Fumble in a greasy till," and "delirium of the brave," among others. Yet that is only the start of the effect of different contexts-historical, textual, and bibliographic-on the complexities of this great poem, one of Yeats's first in his mature bardic voice.
Yeats himself gestured toward other political contexts in a note first published in the Cuala press Responsibilities volume a year later-1914. "in the thirty years or so during which i have been reading irish newspapers, three public controversies have stirred my imagination," he writes; "the first was the parnell contro- versy. . . . and another was the dispute over The Playboy [of the Western World]. . . . the third prepared for the [dublin] Corpora- tion's refusal of a building for sir Hugh Lane's famous collection of pictures. . . . these controversies [were] political, literary, and artistic." Yeats identified the note as applicable to the suite of five poems beginning with "to a Wealthy man Who promised a second subscription to the dublin municipal Gallery if it Were proved the people Wanted pictures" followed by "september 1913" and ending with a poem addressed to parnell, "to a shade," which was followed two poems later by the six-line "on those that Hated 'the playboy of the Western World,' 1907." the note reinforces the connection of the three controversies implicit in the ordering of the poems themselves.
a further link comes through the formidable figure of Wil- liam martin murphy, one of Yeats's chief antagonists in all three controversies. in Yeats's eyes murphy had not only opposed both parnell in politics and synge's...