W.B. Yeats went shopping on Michigan Avenue, where he was so taken with a wardrobe trunk that he bought it, despite having been admonished by his patroness, Lady Gregory, to avoid extravagance during his 1914 American tour.
The Chicago Daily News editorial page, unaware of Yeats’ spree, patted readers on the back for welcoming him:
“When Chicago, the home of the tired business man, can furnish a profit to grand opera companies and an enthusiastic audience for Poet William Butler Yeats, does it not indicate that idealism hereabouts is triumphing over materialism?”
Sophisticated visitors not only scratch our boostery itch, but remembering them returns greatness to a human scale. Yeats later regretted his luggage purchase, because his topcoat wouldn’t fit —giving a whole new meaning to his line, “the center cannot hold” — until his hostess, Poetry Magazine founder Harriet Monroe, showed him how to fold it properly.
St. Patrick’s Day is a moment when parodies of Irish culture, such as green beer and plastic derbies, get far more than their due. So I use the holiday as a pretext to plunge into more authentic, less generally embraced aspects of Gaelic heritage. In past years I’ve joined Yeats in lauding Hazel Lavery, the Chicago woman who graced Irish banknotes for 50 years.
This year I found myself thinking of Irish poets who visited Chicago, such as Yeats, who came here three times. I got the idea by noticing that Sunday was the 75th anniversary of Dylan Thomas drinking at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap. Much myth tends to surrounds such events, but Thomas both signed the bar book and penned letters home on stationery from the Quadrangle Club, where he stayed.
“My love, oh cat,” he wrote to Caitlin Thomas on March 16, 1950. “This is not, as it seems from the address above, a dive, joint, saloon, etc., but the honourable & dignified headquarters of the dons of the University of Chicago. I love you.”
Seamus Heaney also drank at Jimmy’s and dined at Chicago Cut Steakhouse, as my pal Eamonn Cummins observed when we had lunch there last week with Brian Cahalane, Ireland’s consul general to the Midwest.
Ireland doesn’t just send poets. She also ships her share of undocumented immigrants, and I wondered whether they are feeling the boot of the federal government on their necks the way, oh, Venezuelans or Ukrainians are.
“We’ve been told informally the Irish aren’t a target,” Cahalane said. “We don’t have a sense of a crackdown. The focus centers on immigrants coming across the southern borders.”
Wonder why that is. It is worth remembering, on a day when the Irish are being joyfully embraced as beloved civic darlings, just how vigorously despised they were when they first came to America. The Irish were dirty, lazy, physically ugly. And drunken, of course — that we mark the occasional with a public bar crawl is one of those ironies that would shame us if we ever thought about it.
So rest assured, in future years, when Chicago’s bountiful Venezuelan community is being feted, their rum lofted, their poetry read, with every restaurant serving up trays of arepas and pabellón criollo for Simón Bolivar’s birthday, the current federal government vendetta against them will be just another bit of colorful history, like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, which we don’t even realize is a petrified slur reflecting the common view of the Irish as careless firebugs, made quaint by time and lack of context.
Poets! Whoops. I get distracted. I assume everyone knows Oscar Wilde came here. While more playwright than poet, I’d say “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” alone is enough to get him in the club. (“Yet each man kills the thing he loves/By each let this be heard/Some do it with a bitter look/Some with a flattering word.”)
Though Wilde really wasn’t yet much of either a playwright or a poet when he visited Chicago in 1882 but a famous personage, “the great esthete,” giving a national tour, talking about decorative arts.
His deathless remark about the Water Tower was not a tossed off quip but scripted provocation. The hardy little limestone survivor struck Wilde as “a castellated monstrosity with perforated pepperboxes stuck all over it.” Seeing it left him “amazed and grieved.”
Of course it did, Wilde being the patron saint of artifice. In praising local poet Vachel Lindsay, Yeats cited his “earnest simplicity,” an epithet that still applies to Chicago. While not the nest of rubes it was in 1914, Chicago retains the “strange beauty” Yeats mentioned, thanks to the Irish … and Germans, and Italians, and Blacks, Jews and Muslims, Mexicans and Poles, and now Venezuelans and Ukrainians. It amazes me that some people still refuse to see the connection.