Recently I have been very fortunate with conferences on theatre. To be honest, I have been more fortunate with them than with actual theatre performances, as the last several productions I happened to watch proved to be fairly poor choices. Nevertheless, last Friday I attended the Yeats 150 Symposium, a symposium on Yeats, the dramatist. And…
“This summer school can change lives”, as Margaret Mills Harper, former director of the International Yeats Summer School has put it. And she is absolutely right. This summer, I had the pleasure to spend two weeks in Yeats Country, Sligo, among the most determined Yeatsians, and I am looking forward to sharing this amazing experience…
The year 2015 has brought the winds of change in the reception of Yeats not only in Ireland but also in Europe and in the entire contemporary world. Yeats has been reborn in the occasion of his 150th birthday in 2015, and his second coming is manifested in the fine arts, musical productions, poetry and…
So far, there have been only few attempts to film or stage Yeats’s work, and I find it very interesting that Yeats’s presence in pop culture has been, in fact, restricted to some catchy, well-known lines from his major poems in the titles and scenes of certain film productions and in book titles. However, it…
The mask put on by the personaggios or the anti-selves is indispensable for their becoming dominant and, at times, downright oppressive characters. In “Per Amica,” Yeats mentions a saint, St Francis of Assisi, and a politician, Cesare Borgia, to exemplify the importance of this kind of mask: they “made themselves over-mastering, creative persons by turning from…
As mentioned in my previous post, Yeats’s concept of the self and its anti-self (the mask) means that man is, in fact, two men. It also means that they belong to different fields of life, while being strongly connected to one another—the self is stuck in ordinary life, while the anti-self appertains to the fields of…