Would Yeats recognise his 'land of heart's desire'?

The 50th International Yeats Summer School takes place this year, but some feel that the locality he loved is apathetic, if not hostile, to the poet’s legacy

LEGEND HAS it that when he took his young wife, George, to Sligo, WB Yeats hired a boat at Lough Gill and attempted to row out to Innisfree to show her the lake isle he had immortalised. But he couldn’t find it.

Seventy years after his death, as the local Yeats Society finalises plans for the 50th International Yeats Summer School, some devotees believe that if he were to drop into Sligo today, the poet would have difficulty finding many of the local landmarks which punctuated his life and his work.

The threat of demolition hangs over one former family home, there is a proposal to divert the flow of a river in the grounds of another, his great-grandfather’s rectory at Drumcliffe is long gone and the Yeats Society has repeatedly complained about the lack of signposts and plaques to pinpoint other locations immortalised by the man who penned the slogan “land of heart’s desire” about the Co Sligo landscape.

Almost six years ago controversy raged when Sligo Borough Council voted to de-list Markievicz House, a prominent 19th-century building overlooking the harbour, which had been the home of Yeats’s grandparents, William and Elizabeth Pollexfen. But now the proposal is back on the table in the recently published draft development plan for Sligo and its environs.

As far as the Yeats Society is concerned, the proposal underlines an apathy, if not a downright hostility, towards the poet’s legacy. The ambivalence towards a man considered by some as the greatest poet in the English language is nothing new.

At last month’s meeting of Sligo County Council, Independent councillor Declan Bree criticised officials for failing to recommend that grant aid be provided for this year’s 50th summer school and for “consistently refusing” to support the event while providing funds for less important festivals.

“There is an apparent lack of interest, which is hard to understand,” says Michael Keohane, of Keohane’s bookshop on Castle Street, Sligo, who remembers as a child going to nearby O’Dwyer’s pub for trays of drinks as his father hosted meetings of the Yeats Society in the kitchen over the shop. John Keohane tended the grave at Drumcliffe for many years and the family has letters written to him by Yeats’s widow, a woman who apparently turned a blind eye to her husband’s many indiscretions. Stella Mew, chief executive of the Yeats Society and expert on all aspects of the poet’s life, has been invited by at least one woman’s group to give a lecture on the intriguing subject of Yeats’s mistresses.

In response to complaints about its refusal to support the Yeats Summer School on this big anniversary, Sligo County Council points out that the county library is arranging an exhibition on the school’s history, along with a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Yeats’s death, which is due to begin in June.

According to Keohane, this is news to the Yeats Society, which organises the annual get-together of academics, students and poetry-lovers. Literary heavyweights who have attended over the past half-century include Austin Clarke, Cecil Day-Lewis, Richard Ellmann, Derek Hill, Benedict Kiely, Louis MacNeice, Mary Lavin, Frank O’Connor, John Montague and Francis Stuart. In the 1960s students would have seen young poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes reciting their work at late-night sessions in the Columban Club. This was an era when the nocturnal entertainment included watching crabs, caught earlier in the day at Culleenamore, race along Castle Street.

FOR THE FIRST year of the summer school in 1960, writer Peadar O’Donnell wrote a cheque for 50 guineas to cover the fees of all the lecturers. Since then, many anonymous benefactors have helped to keep the show on the road. But recently, when Sligo County Council was asked to cough up half the £11,000 (€11,885) cost of the original manuscript of The Lake Isle of Innisfree by someone prepared to pay the balance to ensure it would find a home in Sligo, the request was to no avail.

American poet Tess Gallagher recalls attending one of the early summer schools when, as a cash-strapped student, she parked her caravan near the town hall, where the lectures were held. She splurged on a painting by Yeats’s daughter, Anne, who had an exhibition during the event, and remembers being one of many to ask the artist if she had got any tips from her uncle, Jack B Yeats.

“She said that she had actually asked him about giving her lessons, but that he had told her he didn’t really know how he did what he did, so he wouldn’t be able to teach anyone,” recalls Gallagher.

The Yeats Memorial Building is a former red-bricked bank on Hyde Bridge in the centre of Sligo, opposite the Glasshouse Hotel where the Pollexfen mills once stood. It is a hive of activity these days as e-mails arrive from all over the globe from students and academics booking their places for this year’s school. Seamus and Marie Heaney, stalwart supporters, have already put their names down and, according to Stella Mew, bookings have been received from Africa, India, Japan, Korea and eastern Europe.

Posters advertising the Yeats Trail in French, German and Japanese are on the noticeboard, while upstairs in the library is a treasure trove of memorabilia, including a family photo album donated by Imogen Stuart, who was once married to Maud Gonne’s grandson.

Most visitors have questions about Merville House, the stately home on 60 acres, with its views of Knocknarea and Ben Bulben, where in the early 1870s the Yeats children stayed with their Pollexfen grandparents (before they “downsized” to Charlemont House) and where Yeats’s brother, Bobby, died of croup shortly before his third birthday.

Merville is now home to the Sisters of Nazareth. The house is dwarfed by a nursing home complex, but the council has erected a plaque on the convent wall to commemorate the Yeats connection.

Sr Bernadine Hannon, the order’s superior in Sligo, says she is conscious that Yeats and his siblings once gazed out of the window of the nuns’ sitting room at the weeping ash and the mountains. “I feel his presence here,” she says.

During the summer there is a stream of visitors to St John’s Cathedral, down the hill from Merville, where paint is peeling off the walls but a beautiful stained-glass window commemorates the Pollexfen grandparents, buried in an elaborate grave near the front door. Yeats’s parents were married in the cathedral and his Bobby was buried in the grounds.

The 50th Yeats International Summer School takes place in Sligo from July 25 to Aug 7. Lecturers include Edna Longley, Roy Foster, Denis Donoghue and Helen Vendler of Harvard University