The Yeats Summer School is not for the faint-hearted. Nor is it for the cultural tourist, Irish or foreign, who wants to dip into a bit of political and cultural debate in one of Ireland's attractive coastal towns when the weather turns nasty.

This summer school, now in its 38th year, requires commitment, and receives it in bucketfuls, both from the distinguished band of lecturers and visiting poets it has accumulated over the years, and from the students. The latter pay £290 to attend for its two weeks and many return year after year, often evolving from student to lecturer in the process. However, day tickets for lectures are available to members of the public.

Each student undertakes a gruelling regime of two morning lectures a day, starting at 9.30 a.m., usually followed by a relevant excursion to a Yeats-related site in the area. In the late afternoon they attend seminars given by the visiting lecturers, which last two hours, and require preparation, a thorough knowledge of Yeats's poetry and prose and other texts, as well as specific tasks for the seminars. Cultural and leisure activities are provided in the evenings, culminating in drinking, singing and talking in the club.

Apart from the enrichment of mind and spirit, the more practical minded may claim credits from their academic institution for participation in the school - with some additional work and the agreement of all concerned - as its 45 hours of work satisfies the requirements of some US universities for credit-based courses.

This week saw the director of the school, Prof Ron Schuchard, stress the central role of spirituality in Yeats's life, trenchantly defending it against his critics, in his opening lecture on Monday morning.

"To Yeats, the realm of spiritual life was larger and more accessible than its representations in organised religions," he said. "Thus he studied Eastern and Western religions, he studied the soul and salvation, immortality and reincarnation, sanctity and sin, good and evil, miracles and visions, dreams and apparitions; he practised divination, astrology, spiritism, ritual magic and automatic writing.

"All his life he marvelled at the extraordinary spiritual powers of the human imagination, he was intrigued by the inter-penetration of the material and spiritual worlds.

"I think of Yeats's life as a spiritual drama, largely a drama of the soul, with its victories and near defeats," he said.

Prof Schuchard described those who criticised Yeats's spirituality as "bullies of the irrational", who seized the opportunity presented by the publication of the first volume of Roy Foster's biography "to deride and dismiss in the Sunday newspapers the entire under pinnings of Yeats's spiritual life.

"Two in particular boggle the mind - two distinguished scholar-critics and longtime tutors of Yeats's work, Terry Eagleton in the [London] Independent and John Carey in the Sunday Times." He quoted from the reviews of both, citing Eagleton as saying: "Yeats was a lot sillier than most of us. Few poets of comparable greatness have believed such extravagant nonsense"; while Carey had questioned the poet's basic intelligence.

"Such critical indulgences," Prof Schuchard continued, "are regularly foisted with impunity on the reading public, as though there could be no connection between the poet's `extravagant nonsense' and his poetry."

The associate director of the school, Dr Anne Fogarty, in her lecture examined the much more material world of the big house and its role as a central image in Yeats's poetry, although the number of poems devoted to a big house is very small. Yeats drew on a obsolete genre of country house poetry, which flourished in the 17th century, in writing poems such as Coole Park and Coole And Ballylee, she said. However, his use of the form hovers somewhere between tradition and modernity.

For Yeats, the big house represented his "nostalgia for beautiful, lofty things" but also revealed his "intense longing for the breaking moments of the future". He drew on two Sligo experiences in his representation of the big house - Castle Dargan and Lissadell. The former was the home of a "reckless squireen" married to one of his Middleton cousins.

In his autobiography, Yeats described this man - brawling, irrepressible, given to extravagant and violent gestures - who was attractive because of his "reeling imagination", because he represented some kind of essence of masculine vigour. But Yeats was also repelled by his "atavistic violence", and there was a sense that he represented "violent Gothic terrors [which] can never be fully assimilated".

Lissadell, on the other hand, brought another set of contradictions. His contact with Lissadell suppressed the associations of his earlier experiences, and brought to the fore the more feminine values of passion and order. "Yeats's feminisation of the big house kept its Gothic horrors at bay."

Students will get a chance to experience Coole Park and Yeats's home nearby at Ballylee at first hand this weekend. Some will opt instead for the poetry workshop all weekend, conducted this year by Eavan Boland.

The lectures resume on Monday and continue all week.