At the Yeats Summer School in Sligo yesterday the poet Bernard O'Donoghue, of Wadham College, Oxford, argued that the distinctiveness of Yeats's poetic voice was a legacy from translators of Irish. In particular he referred to that school of writers, from the late 18th century onwards, summarised by Yeats as "Mangan, Davis, Ferguson".
They brought to the English poetic tradition in Ireland "the metrical variety and vigour of lines like Edward Walsh's `I've the cold earth's dark odour, and I'm worn from the weather'," he said.
Seven-syllable units, which were the structural basis of old Irish poetic forms, were used by Yeats in poems from The Lake Isle of Innisfree to Under Ben Bulben, he said, the latter poem concluding with a summary of the themes and practitioners of Irish poetry "through seven heroic centuries".
In his lecture, Dr Patrick Crotty, of St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, focused on how Yeats's adoption of Irish themes lent a concrete, empirical dimension to his verse. Emphasising the poet's commitment to this world, rather than the "other world", he challenged the popular perception of Yeats's early poetry as escapist.
The "other world" in such poems as The Madness of King Goll (1884) and The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland (1891) was, he argued, often a projection of an inner impulse and might even be said to communicate a fear of madness. The central part of Dr Crotty's lecture was a reading of The Stolen Child in which he stressed the terror rather than the attraction of Faeryland as presented in the poem.
This year's Yeats Summer School, which is the 39th, continues to the end of next week and will include lectures from critics such as Sir Frank Kermode from Cambridge, Prof Helen Vendler from Harvard and the Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole.
Prof Vendler will be concentrating in her lecture on Yeats's The Wild Swans at Coole volume, which was published after the 1916 Rising, and she is expected to address nationalism in the poet's work, one of the themes of this year's school. However, she will also be exploring the form of the poems in the volume.
