11.30 – The National Library Collection
The Pollexfen Building in Wine Street, which formerly housed Yeats’ mother’s family shipping business, will exhibit a small collection of the poet’s memorabilia from the National Library of Ireland and Sligo IT. The Western Development Commission will also show a specially-commissioned film, emphasising Yeats in the community.
12:00 – The Japanese Connection
The Hamilton Gallery on John Street hosts a celebration of Yeats’ love and understanding of Japanese Noh theatre with a specially commissioned exhibition by artist Yoko Akino. The Japanese Connection will be opened by His Excellency Ambassador Atsumi.
3.30 – Yeats Day launch
The official launch of the inaugural Yeats Day, by Minister for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, Jimmy Deenihan TD at Drumcliffe Churchyard where W.B. Yeats is buried. Winners of the Yeats Day schools’ art competitions, the Hawk’s Well Theatre’s Cat & the Moon poetry competition, the Junior and Senior Yeats Cup winners and the CallanTansey essay winner will meet the Minister at Drumcliffe.
7.00 – iYeats at the Hawk’s Well Theatre
The Hawk’s Well will launch the iYeats poetry competition; your chance to submit your own work.
8.45 – No Crows at Dusk
Wonderful musicians No Crows will mark the end of the first Yeats Day in the beautiful 13th century Dominican Friary, Sligo Abbey, Abbey Street.
You can find out more about the Yeats Day celebrations at http://seasonofyeats.com/.
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edited with an introduction by Edward Larrissy
The poets labouring all their days
To build a perfect beauty in rhyme
Are overthrown by a woman's gaze
And by the unlabouring brood of the skies:
And therefore my heart will bow, when dew
Is dropping sleep, until God burn time,
Before the unlabouring stars and you.
'Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty', p.147
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W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T.S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century. The First Yeats deepens our understanding of the making of that poetic imagination, reprinting the original texts of Yeats's three early collections, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1899), The Countess of Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The poems were subsequently heavily revised or discarded. Among them are some of the best-loved poems in English – 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' – fresh and unfamiliar here in their original contexts, together with Yeats's lengthy notes which were drastically cut in the collected editions.
This illuminating edition by Edward Larrissy, editor of W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000), includes an introduction that clarifies the literary, historical and intellectual context of the poems, detailed notes, and a bibliography. It offers essential material for reading –and revaluing – one of the great modern poets.