16 Feb 2006

Internationally-Renowned Poetry Critic to deliver Annual Yeats Lecture at UCC, 21 February

The fourth annual WB Yeats Lecture will be delivered by Harvard Professor Helen Vendler at UCC on Tuesday, 21 February.

Helen Vendler, whose lecture is titled “The Yeatsian Sequence Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”  is generally regarded as the world’s pre-eminent critic of contemporary  poetry.   She has published seminal works on the poetry of Seamus Heaney, George Herbert, Wallace Stevens, John Keats and William Shakespeare and is currently working on a book on WB Yeats.  A former Director of the Yeats Summer School, Professor Vendler has strong links with Ireland and a particular affinity with Cork and UCC where she has delivered many important and original lectures.

Sponsored by ESB International and hosted by UCC, the WB Yeats lecture series has featured such notable international Yeats scholars as Roy Foster and Bernard O’Donoghue.  The series was inspired by the acquisition in 2002 of a large collection of WB Yeats first editions by the UCC Library as a gift from UCC Engineering alumnus and Yeats scholar, Dr Eamonn Cantwell.
 
The lecture series is an initiative of the Library and the Department of English at UCC.  Speaking at last year’s lecture, John FitzGerald, University Librarian described the sponsored series as “...providing a unique opportunity to bring the finest Yeats scholars to Cork to deliver an original public lecture on the life and work of this major Irish literary and historical figure…”

The lecture will take place in Boole II Lecture Theatres at 3pm on Tuesday, 21 February.  Members of the public are invited to attend and admission is free.

188MMcS


 
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