William Butler Yeats's connection with the 1798 Rebellion was recalled at the official opening of the 39th Yeats Summer School in Sligo yesterday.
Dr Thomas Flanagan, critic and author of the best-selling novel set in 1798, The Year of the French, reminded students that the uprising at nearby Killala was the setting for Yeats's best-known play, Kathleen Ni Houlihan.
"That little play, its sources, its being, and its consequences, could constitute a chapter in the history of Irish nationalism," he said. "I cannot read it, even today, without recalling myself at 13, reading it with goose-flesh, ready to take up my pike. Yeomen, fortunately, were in short supply in Greenwich, Connecticut."
He described recollections of the rising in the locality collected in the early part of the century: "In the 1930s one scholar was told by one of the locals, `The French general was named Humbert, but the people in those days were very ignorant. They called him Oombair.' "
He said he was one of the earliest veterans of the Yeats Summer School, having been a visitor when Frank O'Connor was lecturing there. This was the first of many visits both alone and with his family, he said, and they all became so steeped in Yeats's poetry and in the landscape he evoked that his daughter asked him to read A Prayer for My Daughter at her wedding.
Mrs Maura McTigue, president of the Yeats Society, said the bad weather this summer had not deterred 120 students coming from near and far - some from as far away as China - to the school. She said many of those who had attended the school down through the years had returned as lecturers, and others came back year after year.
Later, the students were urged to see the paintings of Jack B Yeats, the poet's brother, in the Niland Gallery in Sligo.
Dr Hilary Pyle of the National Gallery, author of a biography of Jack Yeats, was speaking at the annual ecumenical service held to open the summer school in Drumcliffe church, where the poet is buried.
Sligo and its landscape were a more constant influence on the painter than on the poet, she said. "Jack claimed until the end of his life (whether he was painting Dublin, Kildare or Skibbereen) that there was `a thought' of Sligo in every picture he painted."
Although until recently the neglected Yeats of the two, Jack Yeats was a considerable writer as well as a painter, a friend of Beckett and a crucial influence on his work, she said. He published 16 books, including novels and his theories on art.
"But he was well aware of the greater power of the visual image, the iconic power of the visual, particularly in his late paintings," she said.
Both Jack and William Yeats were deeply spiritual men, in contrast to their agnostic, questioning father.
Jack formed the habit of going to church on Sundays at an early age and later, "though a loner and occasional in his attendance, he was seen moving about the aisles of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin where he lived, silently, looking on from a position apart, but still faithful to his original roots in the Church of Ireland," Dr Pyle said.
"But it was in later life that his innate spirituality found its voice, `opening a larger door to the outside' in magnificent canvases that sing of enlightenment and eternity." Some of these later works have been newly restored and are on display in Sligo, she said.
Formal lectures start this morning with lectures from the director of the school, Dr George Watson, on "Yeats the Victorian", and from the deputy director, Dr Jonathan Allison, on "Yeats's Imagined Communities".
They continue for two weeks, featuring lecturers from Ireland, Britain and the US, including poet Bernard O'Donoghue from Oxford, critics Sir Frank Kermode from Cambridge and Prof Helen Vendler from Harvard and Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole.
Students, who obtain academic credits from attending the school, will attend seminars in the afternoons, and there are poetry-readings, plays and social events in the evenings.
Members of the public are welcome to attend lectures, for a small admission fee, in the Hawk's Well Theatre.