The Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney at the end of the month will open the International Yeats Summer School in Sligo, which this year is aiming to appeal to a wider audience.
A smiling Yeats dressed in jeans, trainers and with ice-cream cone in hand is the image on promotional literature for a festival which will run alongside the summer school. The programme includes country singer Sandy Kelly, folk singer Sean Tyrrell and concert pianist Miceal O'Rourke.
This is the 40th year of the summer school, which has traditionally attracted leading academics from Ireland and abroad, and the festival is a new departure.
The aim, according to the organisers, is to provide a varied mix of literary, musical and theatrical events. The festival also includes poetry readings with John Montague and John Kavanagh and performances of some of Yeats's plays and will be based at the Hawk's Well Theatre.
The format for the Summer School, which runs from July 31st to August 13th, remains the same and the director this year is Prof George Watson of the University of Aberdeen. Lecturers, poets, novelists and dramatists from Ireland, Britain and the US will take part.
The programme examines Yeats's career in relation to those of Dante, Swift, Joyce, Synge, Beckett and others while concentrating on the poet's own works. Academics taking part include Jonathan Allison, Declan Kiberd, Maurice Harmon and Roy Foster.
The themes include the poetry and plays of Yeats, cultural and critical contexts, predecessors, contemporaries and successors, politics and nationalism and contemporary Irish poetry and drama.
Organisers from the Yeats Society have emphasised, however, that the school is not solely academic or confined to university students and graduates.
Information from the society on 071-42693/47264 or website: www.itsligo.ie/yeats/yeats. html.