A 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