THE University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats by asking prominent Irish academics, journalists, politicians and writers to reveal their favourite WB Yeats poems at a special event.
Chaired by the university’s senior lecturer in Irish Studies, Dr Frank Shovlin, the event featured guest who gave insights into their love of Yeats, and read from their favourite poem. As Dr Shovlin put it, “Yeats was Ireland’s greatest poet, and it was important for us to celebrate his work.”
The panel members included BBC Special Correspondent, and Professorial Fellow at the University of Liverpool, Fergal Keane; Ireland’s Ambassador to London, HE Daniel Mulhall, and high profile Irish poets, Tom French and Martin Dyar.
Fergal Keane explained that he is the son of actors who read Yeats to him as a child. He was then lucky enough to attend a school where the English teachers further deepened his love and understanding of the poet — particularly Yeats’s engagement with Irish politics, his philosophical ideas, and his extraordinary love “not just for Maud Gonne, but the idea of Maud Gonne”. Keane chose When You Are Old as his favourite from the Yeats canon. “I love this poem,” he said, “the nicest love poem I’ve ever come across.”
Ambassador Daniel Mulhall said that most people would recognise his favourite, The Isle of Innisfree, perhaps Yeats’s best known poem. Ambassador Mulhall said he also greatly admired the later poems, especially ones dealing with Irish history, such as Easter 1916, “with that wonderful refrain, ‘A terrible beauty is born’”. The ambassador believes that Yeats was very good at analysing and presenting the complexities Irish history.
He said that a as diplomat he found Yeats’s poetry a useful instrument to help explain Irish history to people from abroad who may admire Irish culture but not the elements that produced it.
Martin Dyar a poet from Co. Mayo, chose Cuchulain comforted. Yeats wrote this three weeks before he died, so it can be regarded as his swan song. The Mayo man said that it speaks of crossing over into the spirit world — a concept that Yeats was fascinated with throughout his adult life, and given all the more potency given his nearness to death.
The poet Tom French chose A Prayer for my Daughter, and spoke eloquently about the poet, and a picture of him staring at his child Anne ‘with brand new eyes’.
The poem was written to Anne, Yeats’s daughter with Georgie Hyde Lees, whom he married after his last marriage proposal to Maud Gonne was rejected. The poem is considered an important work of Modernist poetry, although French adds that the poem “ends with a beautiful moment of lift, joy and unexpected reward where his life has changed.”
Extract from A Prayer for my Daughter by WB Yeats
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
