Yeats Summer School: William Butler Yeats regarded his early poetry as "a flight into fairyland from the real world" and once told a friend that he hoped some day to write poetry "of insight and knowledge".
Mr Jonathan Allison, director of the 2004 Yeats Summer School in Sligo, told students it was always difficult to get lecturers to talk about Yeats's early work, partly because it is saturated in the atmosphere of Victorian romanticism, the languor of the fin de siècle and the mystic occultism of the 1890s. Many people preferred the poems written after 1910, he said.
Outlining Yeats's own tendency to constantly revise his early work Mr Allison, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, said the term "early Yeats" was usually associated with the poet's interest in folklore, mythology, fairylore, his involvement with hermetic groups and pursuit of supernatural vision.
The "early Yeats" phase was also associated with the growth of his political views, his commitment to cultural nationalism, which was both distinct from and indebted to the Young Ireland.
Mr Allison said Yeats was obsessed with beginning projects which would bring culture to the forefront of public life, poetry and magic to the forefront of political and literary life and his own work to the centre of literary nationalism. Many people wrongly assume that Yeats started to revise his early work during his "modernist phase", but in fact he had embarked upon a "severe limitation" of himself as early as 1895.
Stephen Spender once said that Yeats's early poems, although beautiful, contained a weariness not associated with the older Yeats: "One cannot imagine him saying today 'I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree', which calls up the image of a young man reclining on a yellow satin sofa. " Mr Allison said that by the 1930s Yeats had risen from his yellow satin sofa and was at the dynamic centre of an electric machine "like some futurist poet in a Bugatti racing car".
Mr Michael Keohane, president of the Yeats Society, said yesterday that interest in the summer school is flourishing. With 120 students registered for the two-week programme - up from 60 in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001 - almost 300 people attended yesterday's lectures.
