W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats is generally acknowledged to be the greatest poet of modern times. Yeats lived an extraordinarily rich and productive life as the guiding spirit of the Irish Literary Renaissance and the founder of the world famous Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland. He was also a member of the Irish Senate, a folklorist, mythologist and a lifelong student of comparative literature and the occult sciences. In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The W. B. Yeats Foundation

The W. B. Yeats Foundation was established in 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of the poet’s death, so as to honor Yeats’s achievement as a man and artist and thereby to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of the richness and diversity of Irish culture.

T. S. Eliot described Yeats as:

“one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them.”

Seamus Heaney has written of the Irish contribution of Yeats:

“In Yeats’s work was the beginning of a discovery of confidence in our own ground, in our place, in our speech, English or Irish.”

Inspired by the many-faceted interests of Yeats, The W. B. Yeats Foundation has, over the past fifteen years, sponsored a wide range of lectures, concerts, poetry readings, symposiums, exhibitions and other events, beginning with:

“The Poet and Politics,” a poetry reading held at New York’s Lincoln Center in April 1989 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death. Readers included Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Eugene McCarthy, Governor Hugh Carey and actresses Tammy Grimes and Vivica Lindfors.

From 1989 – 1993, the Yeats Foundation sponsored, with the help of the Coca-Cola Company, the Yeats International Theatre Festival at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Under the direction of James Flannery, the Festival featured productions of fifteen of the poet’s one act plays grouped under the following titles:

• The Cuchulain Cycle: An Heroic Journey in Five Episodes
• Masks of Transformation: Art and Revolution in the Modern World
• Sacred Mysteries: A Celtic Way of Love and Sexuality
• Art and Identity in Modern Ireland
• Art and Spirituality in Ireland