“Irish poets, learn your trade,” WB Yeats beseeched his contemporaries in his poem “Under Ben Bulben”, written months before his death in January 1939. It is not just a plea, but an argument too: Yeats contends that artistic greatness – immortality, perhaps – could be achieved only through close study of fellow countrymen, acknowledgement of national history, and a willingness to subvert establishment norms. Nearly 80 years on from the poem’s composition, Edna O’Brien – who died on 27 July aged 93 – quoted these same lines at a dinner held in her honour in London in 2019. Adversity, she argued, was the secret to learning the trade.
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