St Mary's Research Fellow to Speak at Celebration of W.B. Yeats

Dr Keith Hopper, Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, has been invited to give a public lecture in Sligo, Ireland, as part of a four-day festival marking the 150^th anniversary of the birth of W.B. Yeats. The lecture, which is entitled A Sense of Place: W.B. Yeats and ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, will take place in Pollexfen House, Sligo, on 13 June at 4pm. The talk will outline the origins and evolution of Yeats’s poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree, and consider the various ways in which it has been read and interpreted over time. The poem will also be reconsidered in the context of the real lake isle of Innisfree on Lough Gill in Sligo. Dr Hopper said, “W.B. Yeats is the most important poet of the twentieth century, and it’s a great privilege to able to talk about his work in my home town. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ is one of Yeats’s most anthologised poems, and arguably his most famous and best-loved. Indeed, the theme of the four-day festival is inspired by this poem, including the Clay and Wattles Made architectural project, which will create a temporary cabin on the real Lake Isle of Innisfree as a special tribute to the poet”. For further information about the Yeats 2015 festival please visit the website. —Keith Hopper teaches Literature and Film Studies for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist (revised edition 2009), general editor of the twelve-volume Ireland into Film series (2001–7), and co-editor of The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien, which appeared in 2013. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and is currently co-editing a series of four books by and about the Irish writer Dermot Healy (2015-16).