Bax and the Celtic North

A feature of scholarship on Arnold Bax is his indebtedness, in his early works, to the Irish literary revival (particularly in the mythology-suffused works of AE and early Yeats) and, in his later works, to the music of Jean Sibelius, and the relationship between these periods. I argue that this relationship, which I summarize by using Baxs portmanteau term of Celtic North, is underpinned by the stimulus of landscape, which, as well as being a means by which to return to the Romantic idea of the sublime, also provides a means by which Bax critiques the more modernist relationship with landscape that underpins the English pastoral school of the 1920s. Thus the Celtic North is the antithesis to the English south land of Vaughan Williams and others.