Poet's son encourages students to absorb Sligo's poetic heritage

The 42nd Yeats International Summer School was formally opened yesterday afternoon by Michael B. Yeats, son of the poet and playwright.

Before he gave his address, Ms Maura McTighe, former president of the Yeats Society, paid tribute to the late Anne Yeats, who died earlier this summer. She was William Butler Yeats's only daughter and he wrote one of his most famous poems, A Prayer to My Daughter, in celebration of her birth.

Ms McTighe asked for a short silence in her memory, and there must have been many present who thought of the lines from that famous poem:

O may she live like some

green laurel

Rooted in one dear

perpetual place.

Mr Michael Yeats, who is also the summer school's patron, was speaking at the Sligo theatre named after one of his father's plays, the Hawk's Well Theatre. "What would my father have made of all this?" he asked this year's 110 students, who come from countries as far apart as the US, Taiwan, New Zealand, Canada, France and Hungary. "I think he would be a little bit surprised at some of the interpretations being placed on his work."

He reminded the audience that while neither he nor his sister had lived in Sligo, their parents had "made sure we knew it well", and he recalled childhood holidays at Rosses Point and boat trips on Lough Gill. "Absorb the atmosphere that helped create a poet", he told the students, many of whom are in Ireland for the first time. "My father lived most of his life elsewhere, but he always looked on Sligo as his home."

Also speaking yesterday were the Mayor, Mr Jude Devins; Mr Edward Wylie-Warren, the current president of the Yeats Society; and Prof Bernard O'Donoghue, of Wadham College, Oxford, director of this year's school.

The Yeats School, which continues until August 10th, is one of the oldest and most successful summer schools in Ireland.

Among this year's speakers from abroad are: Prof Helen Vendler, of Harvard University, on "Yeats Without Rhyme"; Prof John Kelly, of St John's College, Oxford, on "Yeats the Modernist"; and Prof Declan Kiely, of Cornell University, on "Yeats in America".

Other keynote speakers are the poet Tom Paulin, of Hertford College, Oxford, with an intriguingly-titled paper, "Blake and Ireland - Yeats, Joyce and Van Morrison"; Prof Lucy McDiarmid, of Villanova, with an equally intriguing paper, "Yeats and the Peacock Dinner'; and Prof Mitsuko Ohno, of Aichi Shukutoku, Japan.