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Student reports on the 2008 Yeats International Summer School
'Irish poets, learn
your trade
Sing whatever is well made.’
Each
year the Yeats International Summer School brings together
some of the world’s finest scholars in Irish literature. This
year as recipient of one of the scholarships I made the long
journey from the southern most tip of mainland Australia to
the west of Ireland in order to study once more in a ‘learned
school’. It was more than twenty years since I had visited
Sligo and I knew to expect many changes in the town and Ireland
itself, but I also felt apprehensive about returning to a
place filled with associations for me, both personal and literary.
The 2008 Yeats Summer School, however, lived up to its high
reputation and fulfilled all my expectations.
Each
day at the Hawk’s Well Theatre, students attended lectures
which explored the poetry of Yeats, his friends, contemporaries
and the late nineteenth and early twentieth century world
in which he was writing. This year the programme of lectures
reflected the careful thought which had gone into its preparation
and covered a wide range of topics, including associated poets
Ezra Pound, Hugh MacDiarmid and Louis MacNeice. The last lecture
for the 2008 Summer School, given by Ron Schuchard , entitled
‘Yeats in Extremis’ explored Yeats’s last days and the final
poems he wrote during this period. It was a moving and powerful
close to an excellent summer school.
For
two weeks I attended what was for me the highlight of the
Summer School - the series of seminars led by Terence Brown
from Trinity College Dublin on ‘Yeats and the Public Poet’
and in the second week those on ‘ Yeats’s Modernity’ led by
Hugh Haughton from the University of York . In the first week
the seminar discussion focussed on a number of poems, including
Meditations in Time of Civil War , Upon a House
Shaken by the Land Agitation, Easter 1916 and
Leda and the Swan . The second week we looked at
Yeats’s relationship to the modernists and the work of Eliot
and Pound.
The
Yeats International Summer School has always been famous for
its extra curricular activities. In the early days, the Imperial
Hotel and later the Silver Swan Hotel were the setting for
much serious socialising amongst poets, students and lecturers
alike. The many pubs around Sligo provide refreshment at the
end of the day and Connolly’s bar poured many Guinnesses this
summer. Lunchtimes and evenings included music and poetry,
readings from local poets, students and Seamus Heaney himself.
On the last evening of the Summer School students who had
enrolled in the Drama Workshop, conducted by Joan and Sam
McCready, presented Yeats’ play ‘ The Dreaming of the
Bones .’ Modelled on the Japanese Noh plays, it incorporated
features of the Noh tradition, including the use of music,
masks, stylised movements and expressive mode of speech. This
was a most enjoyable production, prepared in less than two
weeks and brought to a close all too soon the Summer School
for 2008.
Visits
to Drumcliffe Churchyard, Carrowmore , Coole Park, Thoor Ballylee
and Lissadell House were additional highlights for me, and
I wish I could arrange to make an annual pilgrimage to hear
the finest Yeatsian scholars lecture and to attend their seminars.
Receiving one of the tuition scholarships made it possible
for me to come so far to Sligo and I wish to thank Stella
Mew especially and the Yeats Society for their kindness and
generosity.
Anthea
Merewether
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