The Yeats Summer School proper opened yesterday with lectures from the director and assistant director, Dr George Watson from Aberdeen University and Dr Jonathan Allison from Kentucky University, though both originally from Northern Ireland.
Dr Watson returned to the discomfort many people feel with Yeats's apocalyptic political vision. "Some critics have found something sinister in his fascination with apocalypse, with its association with violence, the imagery of collusion with dark forces," he said.
Yeats's apocalyptic vision was intertwined with his occultism as well as nationalism, he said. However, this was often met with irritation by his contemporaries, he said, quoting an article in the United Ireland newspaper which ridiculed his ideas.
Mystic visions served a political purpose for the poet, he said. He wanted a visionary answer to the conflicts thrown up by the Parnellite movement, one which would transcend the splits engendered by that experience.
The occult also gave him access to the peasantry of the west of Ireland without having to go through novenas and other mathematical devotions of the Catholic Church, he said.
Yeats was always opposed to the rational. He had written that as a boy he was surrounded by talk of progress, and his youthful rebellion consisted of rejecting it. "One of the reasons for his continuing fascination with Christianity, despite his disbelief, was its irrationality."
But did his fascination with the irrational, the occult, the apocalyptic, drown out compassion, Dr Watson asked. Was he a kind of pornographer of history's violence?
It was true that he was fascinated by apocalyptic moments, they were absolutely necessary for his hungry sensibility. But what they had, above all, was energy. His poetry shows, not just a delight in destruction, but the courage with which the poet confronts loss of all kinds.
"So what one is really responding to in Yeats is a refusal to yield before the `hail of occurrence', the assertion that loss and destruction and deprivation are real, but so are their antithesis, man's inextinguishable creativity."
Dr Allison opened by describing an incident from the poet's youth, when he had been brought by an uncle to a Masonic concert in Sligo. Someone sang a stage-Irish song, and was hissed by the young poet, who waited until the applause had died down to ensure he was heard. "In the 1890s an aesthetic judgment was inseparable from a political one for Yeats."
As a young poet he was preoccupied by the problem of expressing political values without losing aesthetic credibility.
He was involved throughout his life in a dialogue with nationalism. There was an implicit political dimension in his imagery, his use of mythology and history, and the link between his love poetry and the aisling tradition.
But he also sought to define himself as a poet in relation to the 19th century poets of Irish nationalism, Davis, Mangan and Ferguson. His admiration for Davis was modified by his reservations about his "rhetorical" poetry. He said Davis "appealed to the widest rather than the best" audience and Yeats wrote that he refused to allow poetry become the "scullery maid of politics".
He defended Ferguson against his critics on the grounds that his work had simplicity and force. Although Sir Samuel Ferguson was a unionist, he was, according to Yeats, "a better patriot than I am."
Of the three, he most revered Mangan. He saw him as one of the solitary romantics, and compared him to Swedenborg, Blake and Shelley. He also associated the solitary pride and persecution he saw in Mangan with Parnell.
Throughout these early years Yeats was also deeply involved in political activities. But he complained of "the infinite triviality of politics", and he urged a turn from a nationalism based on material things like the land to an intellectual and historical nationalism.
The school continues today with two veterans of previous schools, former director Prof Declan Kiberd from UCD and the doyenne of poetry critics, Prof Helen Vendler from Harvard.