An event every week that begins at 8:00 am on [day], repeating indefinitely
Towards the end of his life, Yeats asked to be buried in Sligo, “when the newspapers have forgotten me.” In fact, few poets have enjoyed such a long afterlife in the news media as W.B. Yeats.
Yeats has become the poet of choice for politicians and presidents on platforms across the globe. From “A terrible beauty is born,” to “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” Yeats’s lines are deeply embedded in our culture. His words continue to question and harangue us, to urge us to greater things and to berate us when we get things wrong.
Geraldine Higgins traces the phenomenon of the quotable Yeats in our multi-media lives and asks what Yeats’s words are being used to tell us or sell us in our contemporary world.
Prof. Geraldine Higgins is the Director of Emory University’s Irish Studies Program, having joined the Emory faculty in 1996 after completing a D.Phil. at Trinity College, Oxford and a B.A. in English and History at Trinity College, Dublin. Her Heroic Revivals from Carlyle to Yeats examines the work of Carlyle, O’Grady, Russell (AE), Synge and Yeats in order to reassess the aesthetic and political dimensions of the Revival’s heroic ideal and its implications for the construction of Irish modernity. Her second book, Brian Friel, is a critical study of Ireland’s most influential and important living playwright.
Introduction by Prof. Abby Bender, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Irish Studies at Glucksman Ireland House NYU.