It takes two Nobel Laureates to pry me loose from Knox County in high summer. After the grading, report writing, rituals and workshops that close one academic year sometime in June, and late August when it all starts up again, there is a peaceful hiatus of reading and writing during which the day’s greatest challenge comes when I amble down to the garden in midmorning to see if tomato hornworms have found my row of heirlooms yet. But then I learned it was the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Yeats International Summer School, and like that stolen child, I was lured away into another world.
Headlined by Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Michael Longley, and Bernard O’Donaghue (and nearly every other Irish poet of note), and Helen Vendler, Roy Foster, Warwick Gould, and Liz Cullingford (and nearly every other Yeats scholar of note), this year’s summer school was a poetry geek’s dream camp. With two seventy-minute lectures, two poetry readings, and a two-hour seminar every day, not to mention performances, excursions, and exhibits stretching over two weeks, the school is part scholarly conference, part poetry marathon, part book launch, part ceilidhe, and a wee bit revival meeting, as we renew the Yeatsian creed. The pace is daunting, and that’s not considering the “Social Club” that convenes in one pub or another every night after the last reading is over. But it’s the achingly beautiful landscape of Sligo and the warmth, generosity, and indefatigable labor of the people of Sligo that make this unlike any academic gathering I have ever attended. Dazed from jetlag and the three-hour drive north from Shannon, sniffing the air for the first scent of peat smoke, I drove along the N4 through Ballysadare-the village where Yeats met the old woman who taught him the song upon which he based “Down by the Salley Garden”-only to crest one last hill and have the great plane of Sligo open out before me, held to the east by Ben Bulben and to the west by Knocknarea with Queen Maeve’s cairn at its summit and the Atlantic glowing just beyond. Clearly I had come away.
Convening an anniversary conference demands the requisite pomp. We gathered first in the Hawk’s Well Theatre to honor legendary lecturers who have returned to speak this year, including-remarkably-Denis Donahue, director of the very first summer school in 1960. Draped in the gold chains of office, his honor the mayor welcomed us to Sligo by remarking that the school has grown so prominent that it now attracts poets whose works appear on the Leaving Cert Exam. Then we embarked upon a driving tour of Yeats Country that culminated (somewhat comically) in the Liturgical Procession of the Bards and Scholars from the Hired Coaches up the Tarmac Walkway through the Driving Rain to the Falls above Glen Car, Umbrellas Aloft. And yet so powerful is this landscape that it immediately crushed my skepticism: Ben Bulben itself marked the ceremonial occasion with a meteorologic display that happens only every few years. Lashed by the howling northwesterly gale, “The cataract smokes upon the mountain side,” as Yeats put it in “The Mountain Tomb,” as a falling stream crashed back up upon itself in great billows of spray. It is Stuth in Aghaidh an Airde (“The Stream Against the Height”), so spectacular that all of us-from the magisterial Professor Vendler to my unromantic self-piled out of the coaches for a few snaps. This is as close to a conversion experience as I’m going to get and, several days later, when Bernard O’Donoghue’s commemorative poem, “Ascent of Ben Bulben,” was offered for sale, handprinted in a run of 350 copies by King Library Press and signed by the author, I immediately ponied up the whopping ???20 for my very own copy. It really is a lovely verse.
“We leave those strange late poems to you fellas,” an elderly Sligo woman told me as we settled into the first lecture. “We love the early songs that we all learned at school.” For a minute, I glimpsed Willie as a local boy whose resonant symbols morphed back into their everyday forms: the aeolian “wind among the reeds” became the nodding rushes in the Garravogue River and “The light of evening, Lissadell,/Great windows open to the south” resolved into the view across a neighbor’s lawn. For local folks, the summer school’s Yeats isn’t simply an object of academic speculation but rather a living part of a living tradition, no matter that “Old, learned, respectable bald heads” gather to “Edit and annotate the lines/That young men, tossing on their beds,/Rhymed out in love’s despair,” as himself put it. One of the fortnight’s most interesting moments emerged out of this tension. After listening to the learned lecturer conclude in plummy Oxbridge tones that the importance of the Sligo landscape for Yeats’s oeuvre has been overstated, a local woman rose during Q&A to correct his mispronunciation of a half dozen place names. “We say ‘Drum-cliff,‘” she informed him-and no matter that it doesn’t scan.
Yet Yeats-early and late-remains a craggy giant who challenges even the most accomplished technical climber, and many of the lectures were dazzling. Warwick Gould painstakingly distinguished Yeats’s symbolism from that of other fin de siecle practitioners. Erudite and witty, Roy Foster surveyed nineteenth-century Irish literature from Carleton to Davis to Ferguson to locate unsuspected antecedents. Edna Longley’s coolly understated but provocative revisionist reading placed Yeats within an “archipelagic” context, arguing his debt to the traditions of the “other island” and the broader importance of recent English poetry to poetry in contemporary Ireland. Humbly admitting that “I didn’t write about ‘Vacillation’ in the book [Our Secret Discipline: Yeats’s Style and Form (2007)] because I didn’t understand it. The lacuna shamed me and so I vowed to return to the poem,” Helen Vendler brilliantly parsed this formally and thematically difficult late poem line by line to reveal an “aged poet uttering in uneven rhythms and rhymes the most pressing questions of life.” The prevailing critical modes were formalist, biographical, textual, with a surprising dearth of younger scholars and recent theory. When I remarked to my new friend Lily that the Yeats School seemed rather old school, she reminded me that we were in an anniversary mode-retrospectively celebrating “monuments of unaging intellect.” Controversies and cutting edges could wait for other years. Nonetheless the analysis of color patterns in the early poems, or the correct ordering of verse in The Winding Stair, or the discussion of the creative endeavors of siblings Lily, Lolly, and Jack became a bit obsessive at times, as when one scholar announced that the original bedspreads for Coole Park, commissioned from Dun Emer’s embroiderers using Lily’s (or was it Lolly’s?) design, had at last been discovered in a private collection in Pennsylvania-a fragment of the true cross.
But it was the living Irish poets that did Yeats most honor. As Eavan Boland (who first attended the school in 1969) put it: “The way that Yeats’s name has been associated with the renewal of contemporary poetry in this place truly is a marvel.” In the slowly darkening twilight of the austerely beautiful Sligo Methodist Church, Bernard O’Donoghue read “Straws in the Wind” in answer to Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.” At lunchtime, Greg Delanty displayed his mastery of the “American sonnet” (“14 lines and nuttin else”) in a rich Cork accent. And there were Moya Cannon, Sin??ad Morrissey, and Dennis O’Driscoll. SRO at the Hawks Well Theatre, Seamus Heaney started out, aptly, with “Singing School,” syncing his choice of poems to the chronology of his participation in the school which he first joined in 1968. But for me as a feminist (or perhaps simply as a rational human being with a sense of history), the most clarifying moment came like a blast of ammoniac smelling salts for the victim of a swoon. All week long in my seminar we had immersed ourselves in Yeats’s famous love poems which, even given Liz Cullingford’s critical readings, still resonate with an intoxicating charge to attend to “the old high way of love.” Who wouldn’t want someone to spread his or her dreams under her feet or to love the pilgrim soul in her? Who doesn’t want “to pluck till time and times are done/The silver apples of the moon,/The golden apples of the sun”? But then, in the dusk of the Methodist Church, Eavan Boland read her brief, brilliant “Quarantine,” twenty lines that narrate the stark end of a couple, dead from famine and “the toxins of a whole history,” and she single-handedly overthrew a long and seductive poetic tradition:
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and the sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:Their death together in the winter of 1847.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in what darkness it can best be proved.
For such a noble gathering, there seems remarkably little swanning about at the Yeats School. Senior scholars and Nobel Laureates rubbed shoulders with undergrads at tea break and relatively few of the headliners parachuted in for a star turn, choosing instead to stay the week-or at least a few days-leading seminars or raising a jar. Yet by week two, I began to wish I was a more astute field anthropologist: was it significant that poet X did not attend the reading of poet Y? Why would a major scholar enthuse about a colleague’s lecture which she hadn’t arrived in time to hear? And would that dashing historian really have had the director’s “guts for garters” if the Powerpoint projector failed? Whatever the palace intrigues, the student population was a genial, ecumenical and truly international lot. Alongside grad students, professors, and H.S. teachers from across Europe, Japan, Canada, Thailand, Australia, and the US, there were any number of Irish Civil Servants, CPAs and consultants, a scattering of Elder Hostel sorts, a health care educator, miscellaneous poets, lots of Sligo residents who came for a couple lectures or readings, and one lawyer whose wife sent him to Yeats camp as a fiftieth birthday present.
Inevitably, the Yeats International Summer School has its requisite school song (“Down by the Salley Garden”), school prizes (the “Labour to be Beautiful” award went to a dishy male lecturer), and school legends (e.g. the tale of the Japanese student who defied the tradition that all who climb Knocknarea carry up a stone to add to Maeve’s cairn and, instead, actually took a stone from the pile as a souvenir. Back in Tokyo, she and her family had such a run of bad luck that she mailed the stone back to the Yeats Building in Sligo with ???25 to hire someone to return it to the top of the mountain). While there is no official school uniform, Sligo averages 300 days of rain each year, so anoraks and black umbrellas are standard. But, as at all schools, it is the bond of community that is its greatest gift. Members of the Sligo Yeats Society like Martin and Joyce Enright, Stella Mews, Maura Kilfeather, Margaret Rafferty and many others labor unstintingly to bring the world to Sligo, so that Yeatsies (as locals call us) can take Sligo to the world. We attended lectures and seminars assiduously, drank gallons of coffee and Guinness, walked up mountains and along strands in the pouring rain, cursed the early starts, rummaged for obscure volumes in Keohane’s bookshop, traded stories, and-of course-quoted Yeats to each other morning to night. It was an extraordinary two weeks. And so to Liliana of Cluj, Romania, Caroline from Rosses Point, Sligo, Jan and Mary Kay from Cape Breton, Canada, Bernett from Manhattan, Rachel of Geneseo, New York, and a dozen others: “Think where [wo]man’s glory most begins and ends/And say my glory was I had such friends.”