YEATS SUMMER SCHOOL:THE YEATS Summer School is a test of stamina. "Social evening exploring Sligo pubs" might not have set off the alarm bells for first-time students of the school from Japan or Brazil perusing the programme on arrival.
But old hands probably responded to this promising appointment with a quick check of the following day’s schedule – an early-morning lecture on “The Love Poet of In the Seven Woods and The Green Helmet” followed quickly by a talk on “Yeats’s Poetry of Youth and Age”.
And just to show that the organisers have a sense of humour, an afternoon stroll up Knocknarea (“weather permitting”) for the afternoon.
But Stella Mew, president of the Yeats Society, was adamant yesterday that the students were well able for the endurance tests provided so far and said many availed of the opportunity to climb the mountain where Queen Maedbh is reportedly buried.
This year the excitement for lovers of Yeats has been ratcheted up a few degrees by the revelations of a newly discovered unpublished play, the first one he wrote, part of which is to be presented next Monday to an audience at the summer school.
More details emerged yesterday about the 127-year-old treasure discovered by staff from Boston College, stuffed into a box with a lot of other material received from the writer’s son, the late senator Michael Yeats, in 1993.
A team of 15 experts from the college has now published the play, Love and Death, online but the joy for many will be seeing the writer’s corrections and notes on photographs of the original handwritten pages on five notebooks and scraps of paper.
Staff at the college, where the Yeats documents are stored in a special climate-controlled room pointed out that they were not always treated with such reverence. Digital librarian Betsy McKelvey commented on the figures doodled on the cover of a notebook “like someone was doing math homework”.
Aspiring young writers may be reassured to know that Prof Marjorie Howes from Boston College was not blown away by the quality of the play written when Yeats was still in his teens. Howes describes it as ambitious but relatively mediocre. “It was interesting to see how ambitious he was, but a lot of it didn’t really work,” said Howes.