William Butler Yeats

Tuesday

Jonathan Keeperman

Is there such a thing as right-wing art?

This has been adapted from a speech titled “The Myth-Maker as Nation-Builder,” which was delivered by Jonathan Keeperman, who runs publishing house Passage Press, at the National Conservatism Conference 2025. As W.B. Yeats once said: “There is no great literature without nationality. There is no great nationality without literature.” People often ask me whether it is possible to produce right-wing art, or otherwise to use art to engineer a more nationalist politics. But this strikes me as backward thinking. Culture is the field in which a people encounters the shared symbols and language that make political life possible. Art, done well, discloses the deeper truths a people already carry within themselves. Art therefore does not produce the nation; it reveals the nation.

Truth

Sunday

Anne Margaret Daniel

The great late Yeats

The 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to William Butler Yeats “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” Informed of the prize late on the night of November 14 by the editor of the Irish Times, the fifty-eight-year-old Yeats and his wife George sat up taking telephone calls and telegrams for a couple of hours. Then, according to Yeats’s sister Lily, the couple went down to the kitchen and cooked some sausages before going to bed. The next day, the Yeatses went out and began spending some of the check Yeats would receive in December.

yeats