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50th Yeats International Summer School 2009

The Yeats International Summer School will run from 25 July to 7 August 2009 in the year of its 50th anniversary. It is certainly not a moment that we shall let pass without celebrations. There will be a full academic programme of lectures and seminars by many eminent scholars of modern literature, with readings by some of the most exciting names in modern poetry, including Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Eavan Boland, Dennis O’Driscoll, Sinead Morrissey, Gerald Dawe, Julie O’Callaghan, Bernard O’Donoghue, Leontia Flynn, Alan Gillis, Moya Cannon, Peter Fallon, Justin Quinn, Peter McDonald and others. The Drama Workshop, run by Sam and Joan McCready, will run throughout the two weeks and culminate in the production of a Yeats play. Award-winning poet Sinead  

Seamus Heaney, Vona Groarke, Michael Longley, Julie O’Callaghan
      Helen Vendler, Denis Donoghue, Liz Cullingford, Roy Foster Morrissey will conduct the Poetry Workshop which takes place over the central weekend. There will be an unusually exciting round of music sessions, concerts, and afternoon excursions in the surrounding Yeats country. The first school, fifty years ago, was directed by Denis Donoghue , now the Henry James Professor in English and American Letters at New York University; he will return to Sligo for the anniversary year, to deliver a lecture entitled “Three Presences: Yeats, Eliot and Pound.” Helen Vendler of Harvard University will open the school officially, on Sunday 25 July, and she will remain at the school to give seminars on Yeats’s middle and later poems and to present a lecture: “Vacillation: the Yeatsian Contraries.” John Kelly (editor of the Collected Letters of W.B.Yeats and a former director of the school) will lecture on the relationship between the poet and his father, John Butler Yeats.  David Fitzpatrick (Trinity College, Dublin) will discuss the complicated relationship between the Yeats and Pollexfen families and Sligo. Other guest speakers will include the poet’s official biographer, Roy Foster (Carroll Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford), Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (editors of Yeats Annual), Ronald Schuchard (Emory) a former director of the school - and other eminent critics, including Edna Longley (QUB), Elizabeth Butler Cullingford (Texas), Terence Brown(TCD), Margaret Mills Harper (Georgia State), George Bornstein (Michigan) and Declan Kiely (Morgan Library, New York). A full list of lectures, seminars and readings can be found on this website. Please write to us for a brochure. Scholarships are available to assist students in meeting tuition and travel expenses. Please join us in Sligo in 2009 for what promises to be a wonderful fortnight.

Pictures from the 2008 Summer School