11 Mar 2005

"Yeats the Love Poet" - Public Lecture at UCC

The distinguished Oxford Fellow and noted Irish poet, Bernard O'Donoghue, will deliver the UCC/ESB International Annual WB Yeats Lecture  at UCC on March 18th next. 

Bernard O' Donoghue who was born in Cullen, Co. Cork is a Fellow in English at Wadham College. He has written five major poetry collections:  Poaching Rights (1987), The Weakness (1991), Gunpowder (1995), which won the Whitbread Prize for poetry, Here Nor There (1999) and Outliving (2003).  He has published some medieval works, which he 'still quite likes' including The Courtly Love Tradition (Manchester University Press, 1982). 

"The poets I consider to be my greatest influences are two that I read a lot in the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Irish poet Richard Murphy who created a kind of formal but free vernacular in books like High Island; and Philip Larkin whose doleful self-mockery is very hard to escape once you get the feel of it" says O'Donoghue.  O'Donoghue is at present editing the Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney but spends most of his time working on what he labels as 'miscellaneous medieval things' which include an essay on Chaucer and love, and another on medieval love - lyrics.

In his lecture entitled "Yeats the Love-Poet" O'Donoghue will describe the distinctiveness of Yeats's great love poems.  According to O'Donoghue "Everyone thinks of love as one of the great subjects of poetry. And everyone knows about Yeats and Maud Gonne as a case in point. In fact though the way Yeats devoted himself to love as a major subject - and it is his most successful subject - is very unusual in the annals of poetry in English after the Renaissance."

The lecture, sponsored by ESB International, takes place at 2.30pm, on Friday, March 18th next, in Boole 2 Lecture Theatre, Main Campus, UCC.

The lecture is open to the public and admission is free.

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