Yeats Now: Why we still need W.B. Yeats’s poetry [Rewatch ▷]

Yeats Now

Global Irish Studies at Georgetown University, in conjunction with Georgetown’s Humanities Initiative and Solas Nua, present:

Yeats Now: Why we still need W.B. Yeats’s poetry

A celebration of Joseph M. Hassett’s latest book,

featuring actor Lisa Dwan, poets Paula Meehan and Teri Cross Davis, and more.

This event took place on

Tuesday, January 19 • 5 PM ET / 10 PM GMT

‘Joseph Hassett has written two powerful and insightful books on W.B. Yeats but this is something new. In a personal, quizzical, imaginative testament he ranges through Yeats’s thought and writings, showcasing and discussing a series of ringing statements, suggestions and aphorisms that evolve into a kind of vade mecum or guide to life. Yeats believed that ‘a poet’s life is an experiment in living’, and Hassett’s book extracts and distils the rich outcome of that experiment. It is a work of personal engagement that will strike a chord with everyone who cares for Yeats, and anyone who loves poetry.’

– Roy Foster

 W.B. YEATS believed that lyrics can ‘take on a second beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life’. By focusing on Yeats’s most memorable lines of poetry, Joseph Hassett reveals new ways of enjoying a body of work that speaks to the twenty-first century. This book is an enriching companion to the work of one of the world’s great poets. Its iconography – portraits, photographs, book designs, manuscript letters – illuminates the poems and the life. Its continuing dialogue with writers past and present, from Joyce to Beckett, Heaney and others, offers up an enduring harvest of wisdom for our age.

 


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