Yeats Summer School: The Yeats international summer school needs funding and more volunteers to serve on its organising committee, an analysis of the school in its 46th year has revealed.
The analysis was carried out by Stella Mew and Phelim Donlon, who are among the current organisers. "The day of the volunteer is very nearly over," said Ms Mew. "Modern life is so busy these days. However, we do need new people to get involved."
She said similar schools in Britain were "funded to the hilt" by comparison with Ireland.
"There is an appreciation there of the commercial and tourism value of such schools. We would hope for funding from the Arts Council, Sligo and Leitrim county councils and the enterprise boards," she added.
Michael Keohane, president of the Yeats Society, said there had been claims that the school was elitist. "I do not regard this as a criticism, just a bad choice of words," he said. "We deal with poets and poetry, which transcends all communication, except divine intervention." He added that when Yeats had been asked how he felt on one occasion, the poet had replied: "Today, I am not feeling well, I can only write prose."
Meanwhile, on Monday, an archive of the school dating back to 1960 will be launched at the Sligo Institute of Technology.
Lectures delivered over the years have been preserved by being converted into digital formats. The project, which was funded by the Heritage Council, was jointly undertaken by the Yeats Society and the institute.
Among those featured is Frank O'Connor, who told the school in 1962 that "Yeats was the greatest practical man of the theatre" he had ever met. Also included are Tom Flanagan, Edward Said, Seamus Heaney, Frank McGuinness, Denis Donoghue, Gus Martin, Thomas Kinsella, Richard Ellmann, Kevin Nowlan, Angela Bourke, Helen Vendler and Patricia Lysaght. Some of the lectures recorded in the 1960s are accompanied by Sligo street sounds.
In an analysis of The Wind Among the Reeds, Charles Armstrong, associate professor of English at the University of Bergen, Norway, evoked Yeats's unrequited love for Maud Gonne.
He said a lot of the critical attention paid to the love poems in the collection had focused more on identifying their biographical backdrop than paying them sustained critical attention. John Harwood, in particular, had been assiduous in finding links between the poems and Yeats's "tortured love life of the 1890s".
