HISTORY OF YEATS INTERNATIONAL SUMMER SCHOOL


Sligo is a town of 25,000 people on the North West seaboard of Ireland. It enjoys a world-wide reputation that larger and more strategically placed cities envy. This is due to its unique connection with possibly the most popular poet (at least in the English language) of the 20th century world, W. B. Yeats.

Actually he wasn't born there - neither did he live there for any extended period. He was born in Dublin in 1865 and when he bought a house for his wife George, he chose to do so in Galway. However, through his mother Susan, he absorbed her consuming passion for her native Sligo; long periods of his childhood were spent there and the shy, sensitive seemingly backward boy ( he didn't read until he was nine - and never really learned to spell ) looked, listened and absorbed through his senses the beauty, the magic and the myths of Sligo. Places like Drumcliff, Inisfree Island, Benbulben, Knocknarea, Glencar, Rosses Point, Cummeen and many other places in this county he named in his works. Whatever he wrote, as with his brother Jack in his paintings, had something of Sligo in it.

In 1959 a small group of Sligo citizens met in a room in the local library with the objective of forming an organisation to honour the poet they felt belonged to Sligo. They had a whip around and with a donation of 5/ ( 5 old shillings ) each they founded the Yeats Society. Now with 30/ - (about 2$) in the kitty where next?

Well luckily the great Professor Tom Henn of St. Catherine's College, Cambridge was a regular visitor to Sligo. When members of the newly formed society approached him and asked his opinion on how best to honour the poet, his reply was " Hold a Summer School ". He was very specific about the kind of school he envisaged; he saw it as a two week mini-university with lectures and seminars of the highest academic standards. He was adamant that it should not be affiliated to any recognised University that it should create its own universality with Yeats's works at its core but also extending to related topics of Anglo Irish Literature past and present, Celtic mythology, Japanese Drama and other topics relevant to the core theme. Basically that is, after over 40 years, the Yeats Summer School ethos. Students come from all over the world each August to Sligo - and what a journey many of them make - from every continent in the world but particularly from the U.S and Great Britain, to Dublin and from there to Sligo.

All ages are represented - young Oxford undergraduates, retired American attorneys, serious doctoral students, policemen, teachers, housewives and many poets, all with one thing in common - a desire to see the countryside that inspired Yeats and to learn more about the poet and his family in the place that inspired him and the place where he very definitely chose as his final resting place -

Quote… " I longed for a sod of earth from some field I knew, something of Sligo to hold in my hand. It was some old race instinct like that of a savage, for we had been brought up to laugh at all display of emotion. Yet it was our mother, who would have thought its display a vulgarity, who kept alive that love ". { Reveries }

There is a special sub-committee of the Yeats Society which has the responsibility for organising the school at local level - finding accommodation for the 150 or so students and lecturers, arranging receptions, venues, seminar rooms, printing brochures and programmes and above all working within a budget. We greatly value the sponsorship given by generous Sligo citizens, and the funds contributed that allow us to offer a limited number of scholarships to needy students. Applicants need to submit a letter of recommendation from their University when applying for a Tuition Scholarship.

We endeavour to fund those places by fundraising, by individual or corporate sponsors, by grants from certain universities.

It's a battle we face every year and each year we make ends meet - just about.

When the founding fathers of the Yeats Society started the Yeats International Summer School I'm sure in their wildest imagination they didn't see it as lasting for 47 years. Well it has - and looks as if it will continue well into the foreseeable future.

Maura McTighe
Chair of Schools Committee