In an upstairs corridor of the Yeats Memorial Building in Sligo, two women talked about a local family in tones of intense concern. No doubt, said one, but that the father was a philanderer. No doubt but that his behaviour forced his children to live in abject poverty, that it almost ruined their lives, that it caused his wife's withdrawal from life into loneliness. Work? He never did a day's work in his life. His son, on the other hand; his son knew how to work.
The work ethic of WB Yeats and his sisters, and the dubious ethics of his father, the barrister-turned-painter John Butler Yeats, were the topics that fuelled the fire of participants on the first day of the 47th Yeats International Summer School. Though primarily academic in its approach, with speakers and tutors including Séamus Deane, Nicholas Grene and Edna Longley, the two-week programme of lectures and seminars allows plenty of scope for consideration of the life and work of Yeats.
On Sunday night, the label of dysfunctionality had been hurled at the Yeats family by critic Bruce Arnold during his oration at the poet's burial place in Drumcliffe. This raised a few eyebrows, and heckles along with them.
Maureen Murphy, associate director of the school, paused during her paper to argue, to murmurs of agreement from the audience, that the Yeatses were "eccentric" and nothing more.
But how did Yeats react to the example of his workshy father? Patrick Crotty, director of the school, gave a paper which proved - if any proof was needed - that he went in entirely the opposite direction.
Not only did Yeats work extremely hard, argued Crotty, but he concerned himself with themes of drudgery and labour from his very first poem, and was conscious of the danger of longing for an ideal existence free from toil.
There were even dark moments later in his life when Yeats worried that he had made the wrong decision in becoming a poet; that other forms of labour might have been more worthwhile. The line he gave to his character Emer, "it is not meet to idle life away", came from Yeats's own worldview.
Idling the fortnight away is hardly an option for the students who have travelled from countries including Japan, Germany, Italy, Canada and the US; two lectures each morning will be followed by seminars on Yeats's poetry, while the evenings will be filled with readings, exhibitions and plays.
The drama group will rehearse for four hours daily for a production of Yeats's 1916 play, At the Hawk's Well, to be performed next Thursday at the Hawk's Well Theatre, Sligo.
As for the break between morning and afternoon activities, several students on Monday chose to spend it in the library of the Yeats Memorial Building. Lunch is for wimps, as Yeats might have said.