It is 41 years since the group of people who founded the Yeats Summer School met in Sligo county library to consider a way of celebrating the life and work of the poet, the president of the Yeats Society told students at the opening of the school yesterday.
Mrs Maura McTigue recalled that they collected 30 shillings (£1.50) in a whip-around, with which they embarked on the project of a summer school.
In August 1960 the first school was held, with 83 students. At the end of it the society found it had made a profit of £408, 13 shillings and eight pence, and went on from there. Of that group, only Mr Jim McGarry was still alive, she said.
The school was opened by Nobel laureate and veteran of many a Yeats Summer School, Seamus Heaney. "He [Yeats] would have regarded the 1999 Yeats Summer School as significant, coming at a time when the century and the millennium turn," he said.
He said he had been coming to the school, on and off, for 30 years. As he arrived in Sligo, framed by the mountains, Knocknarea on the one side and Ben Bulben on the other, they were like images of a mother and father. "Knocknarea is like a nurturing breast where the young Yeats could be imagined to have taken in all that was precious in Irish culture.
"On the other side Ben Bulben is a prominent, oedipal, affirmative daddy of some sort, a majestic and haunting presence.
"Every time I go to Rosses Point, or Lough Gill, or Lissadell, I get a special sense of standing in a line. There is a spatial sustenance. . .which quickens the being every time you enter it."
There was also, he said, refreshment to be found from the school as a locus of intellectual and artistic life. Critics, poets, artists, dramatists, singers, all came there. "There is nowhere else where they can all be at eye level. People of the highest distinction come to Sligo. They are performing the spiritual intellect's great work out of a sense of service to the poet's work."
But also, he said, quoting Wordsworth, it was a place for "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love."
He recalled giving his first lecture to the school when it was under the direction of Prof Norman Jeffares, on whose work he relied heavily for his teaching. When he went home he received a letter from Prof Jeffares, not thanking him for his contribution, but consisting of three hand-written pages about income tax. The young poet had been sharing his worries about tax with the great critic, and the professor then gave detailed instructions on how Heaney could sort out his affairs.
The school was also remarkable for the involvement of local Sligo people, he said, and gave a special sense of intimacy with the poet and his work through the presence of his children, Anne and Michael.
"One of the greatnesses of Yeats's poetry is that it is adequate to the moment," he said. "In this century, which opened with the first World War and ends with Kosovo, which saw so many things which leave most of us speechless, Yeats's poetry can hold the moment."
Prof George Watson, director of the school, reminded students of one of those events when he recalled that the Omagh bomb went off just as the school ended last year. It was a mark of the closeness of the participants in the school that so many who had been there wrote to him about the explosion.
Students and lecturers then trod the well-worn road to Drumcliff church, in whose graveyard the poet is buried.
There they heard the Rev Dr Niall Ahern, the administrator of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Sligo, stress the importance of poetry. "In order to know the God of celebration we need our prophets and our poets and that is why this evening I dwell on their sacred place in our society," he said.
"Prophets and poets are set against the world because they cannot accept that what seems to be is all there is. Their inklings are the - as yet - undisclosed adventures of God and since neither are the acknowledged legislators of the world, they come with no tablets of stone", he said.