Yeats, Bealtaine, and the Aesthetics of Cultural Idealism: "In the Hidden Places of Temples"

The 1899 issue of Beltaine, a “little magazine” published in conjunction with the Irish Literary Theatre’s inaugural productions, puts forward principles of a cultural idealism that represent a transitional ideology for its editor, William Butler Yeats. This fin de siecle publication marks an intermediate stage between the malleable national ideologies Yeats espoused in the 1880s and early 1890s, and his paradigm of cultural nationalism that would emerge in the early years of the twentieth century. In the years preceding the formation of the Irish Literary Theatre and the publication of Beltaine, Yeats embraced a flexible ideology, owing at least in part to his financial concerns. As Yuh Mohit Chaudry notes,