The number of summer schools in Ireland now runs to dozens, but the doyenne of them all remains the Yeats Summer School, now in its 41st year in Sligo.
Every year it brings together for two weeks academics, students and those who simply admire the work of the poet from Ireland and abroad, especially the US.
This year it was opened on Sunday by novelist Edna O'Brien. She said Yeats was induced to write by his love for and idealisation of woman, the muse, for many years embodied by Maud Gonne.
"But surely it had its genesis in his mother, Susan," she said, describing how the invalided woman had told her son stories from her native Sligo while they lived for many years in London.
The Yeats household was dazzled by Maud Gonne when she arrived with a cage full of canaries, she said. The young poet devised strategies to involve him and her together in public life.
She remained attached to her French lover and father of her daughter, Lucien Millevoye, but she and Yeats had a mystic marriage. "There was a love and there was a unity," Ms O'Brien said. She described how the poet had an affair with Olivia Shakespeare. Following his engagement to his future wife Georgie, he wrote to Lady Gregory imagining her about domestic tasks, adding that "her strong bones might kin dle his desire - hardly the words of a bethrothed".
Yet after their marriage and her discovery of her talent for "automatic writing", she became his Delphic oracle.
In later years he entered into an "libidinous old age", having affairs with a succession of wo men, but at the end he thought again of Maud Gonne and she was restored to Olympian heights in his poetry. "It is a great thing for us and for poetry that he had so many muses and that they enchanted him along the way," she concluded.
Yeats constructed a version of England in order to contrast it with Ireland, according to the director of the school, Prof George Watson of Aberdeen University, who gave the opening lecture yesterday.
This represented England as puritan, utilitarian, merchandising, ugly, "the England of cash and fact", having abandoned its past as the exuberant and extravagant "Merrie England" of Shakespeare. "Yeats was intensely aware how closely Victorian Ireland was following Victorian England," he said. He promoted his vision of the Celtic Twilight to counteract this, but in fact a cult of the Celt was very fashionable in the London of the 1890s, "sick with self-loathing for its materialism".
The poet brilliantly manipulated a constructed England to criticise Irish writing and Irish literature, according to Prof Watson. Quoting the critic Denis Donoghue, he said: "Yeats invented a country and called it Ireland." This could equally be said in relation to England.
The deputy director of the school, Dr Jonathan Allison of Kentucky University, spoke of Yeats's contempt for the War Poets who were his contemporaries. Although he influenced Wilfred Owen, he described his work as "not fit for a country newspaper".
Justifying his exclusion of the War Poets from his edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats wrote that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry".
Yet clearly some soldiers had read Yeats and brought him with them to France, said Dr Allison. He read a parody of Yeats's bestknown poem, The Lake Isle of Inishfree, written by a soldier, William Oliphant Downs, during the first World War. It read:
I will arise and go now, and go to Picardie,
And a new trench-line hold there of clay and shell-holes made,
No dugouts shall I have there, nor a hive for the Lewis G.,
But live on top in the b. loud glade.
And I may cease to be there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the mouth of the Minnie to where the sentry sings;
There noon is high explosive, and night a gunfire glow,
And evening full of torpedoes' wings.
I will arise and go now, though always night and day
I'll feel dark waters lapping with low sounds by the store,
Where all our bombs grow rusty and SAA;
I'll feel it in the trench-feet sore."
However, Dr Allison said, Seamus Heaney gave an implicit reply to Yeats's prohibition on writing of "passive suffering" in his translation of Beowulf, describing the unbearable dilemma of the father who must kill his son because he had accidentally killed his own brother.
Heaney gives his "allowance" to all poets who see an overwhelming suffering "and cannot see any appropriate activity against it", he said.