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Welcome to the Yeats Society!
The Yeats Society was founded in Sligo in 1958 in order to commemorate and
honour the memory of W.B. Yeats, and to promote appreciation of his poetry and
other writings, and an awareness of the other members of this talented family.
 The Society operates from the Yeats Memorial Building in the very centre of
Sligo, overlooking the River Garavogue. The building is the administrative centre of the Society and houses the Yeats Exhibition Centre of the Society, The Sligo Art Gallery, and the Yeats River Café.
The Library provides reading and learning space for students who wish to consult its unique collection of books, and to listen to and view the DVD collection of lectures given at Yeats Summer Schools over more than forty years.
The Society seeks to contribute to the many cultural activities in Sligo, and gladly provides space for book launches, poetry readings, lectures and public meetings.
Highlights of the year are undoubtedly the Yeats International Summer School, held each year at the end of July and beginning of August, and the Yeats Winter School, held over the last weekend of January or in early February, but each year sees other specific events, and the office remains busy all year answering queries and keeping in touch with Yeatsian scholars and students from all over the world.
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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
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LATEST NEWS
Yeats Winter School
Friday 29th - Sunday 31st January, 2010
Director: Professor John Kelly.
(St. John's College, Oxford)
Details
of the Winter School will follow shortly.
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Yeats
Christmas Dinner 2009
The Yeats Christmas Dinner is being held in the Yeats
Memorial Building on Saturday 12th December 2009 at
7.30 pm. Please apply to the Yeats Office for tickets
(€ 35 each).
Book early to be sure of a place.
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