Yeats

W. B. Yeats and King Oedipus
Yeats's quest for an idiom to convey the essence of Greek tragedy has influenced our greatest poets and dramatists.

In the minds of Irish-nationalist men of letters, around the end of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth, there existed a special affinity between Ireland and Ancient Greece. There might even be a shared mission. According to Patrick Pearse, who headed the Easter Rising in 1916, “what the Greek was to the ancient world the Gael will be to the modern”. Above all, though, the sense of affinity rested on the perceived kinship between traditions of heroic poetry and myth. For the historian Standish O’Grady, the Irish heroic age surpassed even the Homeric.

in reference to: W. B. Yeats and King Oedipus - Michael Silk - TLS (view on Google Sidewiki)