There are only a few days left, so if you are scrambling for inspiration for that perfect gesture or that looking for that perfect gift, have a glance at IrishCentral’s ten romantic Irish ideas for St. Valentine’s Day.

WB Yeats is quoted as saying “The place that has influenced my life most is Sligo” and what better way to sell Yeats county than off the back of his words. “Arise and Go Now” is a campaign established by public and private interests to attract new visitors this summer.

Sligo is set to host its inaugural celebration of the life and legacy of W.B. Yeats on June 16th, Yeats’ birthday. ‘Yeats Day’ will feature events throughout the day to celebrate and remember the works of Yeats in the places that were so near and dear to his heart.

Ireland’s world famous Druid theater company will present Sean O’Casey’s epic play The Silver Tassie at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York from July 24-31. It’s a rare opportunity to see the play that led to a bitter public feud between two of Ireland’s greatest writers, O’Casey and W. B. Yeats. CAHIR O’DOHERTY talks to Tony winning director Garry Hynes about the unmissable new production she’s bringing to New York.

Boston College will publish an online edition of "Love and Death" on July 15, 2011.  This was the first play by Irish Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats that has never before been published or performed.

‘Romantic Ireland is dead and gone.  
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.’

    Paul Murray’s first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the 2003 Whitbreat Award. His second novel, Skippy Dies, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Murray studied English at Trinity College Dublin and received his Master’s in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Skippy Dies takes place inside and outside the walls of Seabrook College, an established Catholic boarding school in wealthy South Dublin. Daniel “Skippy” Juster, one of its fourteen-year-old students, does die, on page 5 of the prologue. Murray spends the rest of the 661 pages telling us what led up to and what follows Skippy’s death on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut Shop – revealing much about contemporary Irish society along the way.    

    It will come as no surprise to admirers of W.B. Yeats that this greatest of modern poets was a celebrant of the art of love from the beginning to the end of his long and immensely productive career.  But now, thanks to a brilliant and magisterial work of scholarship by Joseph M. Hassett, we can fully appreciate how much Yeats owed to the women in his life – nine women, to be precise, whose alluring mystery held him in thrall and inspired in him the heightened state of consciousness he believed necessary for creative expression.
    As Hassett explains, from the outset of his career Yeats was convinced that art at its most sublime springs from the influx of a supernal form of knowledge far beyond the realm of ordinary discourse. In following this belief Yeats was predisposed to accept the Greek idea that poetry is inspired by the Muses, as expressed in Plato’s dictum that “all good poets…compose their beautiful poems not by art [techne] but because they are inspired and possessed” by the Muse who speaks through them. In Ireland this concept was also part of the courtly love tradition imported by the Normans in the twelfth century and grafted onto the highly spiritualized love poetry of the Gaelic bardic order.  In the Irish version of courtly love, a leanansidhe, or fairy mistress from the otherworld, afflicted the poet with an overwhelming desire to celebrate the magical wonders of the beloved and thus win her for himself.  Such profound feelings did the leanansidhe inspire that to be deprived of her presence was equivalent to losing one’s faith in God. Hence the theme of love and loss that recurs over and over again in the hauntingly beautiful love songs of Gaelic Ireland – a tradition with which Yeats was thoroughly familiar from his study of Irish folklore. 
    In the courtly love tradition the Muses were deliberately wooed by the poet to extend his spiritual and aesthetic capacities to their furthest possible reaches.  Dante’s pursuit of the unattainable Beatrice – “the suffering of desire,” in Yeats’ phrase – inspired him to become, again in Yeats’ words, “the chief imagination of Christendom.” The sheer unattainableness of the beloved was one of the essential components of the relationship between the poet and his Muse – that and the terrible frustration of thwarted love. This deliberately cultivated torment for the sake of art is, as Hassett explains, the only plausible reason for Yeats’ 28-year fruitless pursuit of the Irish revolutionary leader Maud Gonne.
    Has there ever been a more ardent, exalted, emotionally expressive or tortured tribute to a real life Muse than that contained in the poems and plays of Yeats inspired by Maud?  She was everything to him, including the way she symbolized an Ireland proud, solitary and stern that had thrown off the bonds of British colonialism and become a beacon of enlightenment in the modern world. An impossible dream, yet much of Ireland’s eminence in the arts today is due to the fact that the poet gave it voice.  The frustration of Yeats at his inability to win the hand of Maud also inspired some of the most heart-scalding poetry ever penned. But, as Hassett emphasizes, the suffering of the poet was justified by the awareness on the part of both his Muse and himself that the pain he endured was a necessary condition of service to the higher purposes of art and nation.
    Had this book only been confined to an examination of the relationship between Yeats and Maud Gonne in light of the courtly love tradition, it would have been a major achievement.  But Joseph Hassett also considers the poetic enterprise of Yeats as affected by eight other women who functioned, each in a uniquely different way, as living incarnations of the Muse. Chief among these was his wife George Hyde-Lees, a gifted woman of only 25 when, in October of 1917, she married the then world-famous poet who was twice her age. Yeats came to the marriage partly as a way of escaping the emotional turmoil of his relationship with Maud, but he nonetheless feared that domesticity would cost him his poetic inspiration.  On their honeymoon George astonished her distracted husband by suddenly assuming the voice of a messenger from the otherworld with secrets to impart. To his delight and enchantment, the communicators of George revealed to him that the moment of sexual union was a portal to knowledge of the spiritual world – a knowledge that carried with it a metaphorical language rooted in a belief system of stunning power and richness.
    Some 3600 pages of the automatic writings dictated over a five-year period to George by her ghostly messengers provide a tangible record of this strange but highly productive Yeatsian encounter with a Muse in the form of his own wife. The poems and plays that resulted from this experience represent the most significant transformation and growth of his entire career and include such masterpieces of literary modernism as Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) with “Easter 1916,” “The Second Coming” and “A Prayer for My Daughter” as well as The Tower (1928) containing “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “Leda and the Swan” and “Among Schoolchildren.” None of this would have been possible without his marriage and what the eminent Yeats biographer and critic Richard Ellmann described as the “great exfoliation of his talent” that followed. Ellmann avers that, had he died in 1917, Yeats would have been known as simply “an important minor poet.” Instead, the new confidence out of which he began to write was directly due to the esoteric knowledge and symbolic language to which his wife gave him access. Henceforth he would be recognized, in the words of T.S. Eliot, as “one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age that cannot be understood without them.”
    Perhaps the most startling and intriguing of all the living Muses who inspired Yeats was Iseult Gonne, the daughter of Maud, who possessed a lithesome loveliness, a playful flirtatiousness and a remarkably advanced intellectual sophistication when in 1912, at the age of eighteen, she began to exert an uncanny influence on Yeats’ imagination during a period when he was beginning to fear that his creative fires were extinguished. Yeats, then a middle-aged man of forty-seven, found himself struggling over his increased infatuation with Iseult even as in lyrics such as “A Memory of Youth” he acknowledged how “Love,” or inspiration, would have died were it not for the intervention of “a most ridiculous little bird [who] Tore from the skies his marvelous moon.”  The little bird is of course Iseult while the moon, in the tradition of the White Goddess of courtly love, is a source of the wisdom required by the artist for meaningful expression.
    In a letter to Yeats, Iseult described herself as both his “pupil” and his “teacher.”  At several points in their relationship they even considered marriage to one another.  Yeats was relieved when the “wild gusts of feeling” provoked by the Lolita-like Iseult subsided in favor of “a new life of work and common interest” with George.  Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to view their relationship as simply the clichéd obsession of an older man with an attractive younger woman. As Hassett makes clear, their friendship was founded upon profound intellectual and spiritual communion. That and Yeats’ awareness that Iseult was capable of reviving his creative life in the capacity of an alluring but incorporeal Muse who stimulated a desire that must forever be deferred.
    From the outset Iseult was aware that she was destined to play the role of Muse for Yeats, though as Hassett points out, in a touching and somewhat rueful poem of hers she proclaimed that being a Muse was but “a strangely useless thing.” This and many other aspects of Iseult made their way into the philosophical essays, poetry and plays of Yeats written between 1912 and 1917. His subsequent rebirth as a writer under the influence of George could not have occurred without the intervention at a crucial moment in his life of a youthful Muse who variously oscillated in his poetic imagination as a girl-woman of immense self-possession, grace and charm, a seductive but unattainable object of desire and a source of revelation about the process of creativity itself.
     One of the most remarkable aspects of Yeats’ relationship with women is, as Hassett emphasizes, how much of their wisdom he absorbed and then garbed in his own redolent verse. Several of the Muses discussed by Hassett also inspired the psychologically rich and subtle characters in his plays. The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), for instance, explores the complex interrelationship among human and spiritual forces unleashed by the poet’s powerful feelings for Maud, Iseult and his wife George. The play opens with an exquisite lyric directly inspired by Iseult that at the same time functions as a meditation on the unfathomable longings stirred in the poet by the eternal feminine as “romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her shrine.”

A rarely seen photograph of the Irish poet WB Yeats, taken shortly before his death, went on public display for the first time this weekend at the famous Lissadell House in County Sligo.

Leonard Cohen played before a crowd of 20,000 devoted fans at Lissadell House, Sligo, with two concerts over the weekend.

If the Irish Repertory Theatre were never to stage another production they should still be garlanded in olive leaves and paraded down Broadway for having the stamina and artistic daring to bring us what they are understatedly calling the "Yeats Project," a month-long festival of all 26 rarely performed plays written by Ireland’s greatest poet, William Butler Yeats.

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Should any writer down the road choose to give William Butler Yeats the treatment Colm Tibn has given Henry James, Scribner's 14-volume series on the writings of Yeats will surely be invaluable. The latest volume, titled "W.B. Yeats Early Articles and Reviews," edited by John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre, explores articles and reviews written between 1886 and 1900. Obviously this is not exactly light reading. Still, fans of Yeats will likely be fascinated by the extent to which Yeats was deeply engaged in intellectual arguments of his time, particularly those revolving around the "Irish Renaissance" he famously championed. Already collected by Scribner have been the poems, plays and early and later essays of Yeats. Up next are later articles and reviews, "mythologies," and two volumes intriguingly entitled A Vision. ($40 / 672 pages / Scribner)

Editor Richard J. Finneran expands on earlier collected "The Yeats Reader." This edition includes not only Yeats many classic poems, but also plays, autobiographical writing and fiction. Perhaps most interestingly, there are six poems in which Finneran gives us what you might call "before and after" versions. That is, we see the initial version of "Leda and the Swan", first published in "The Dial" in 1924, as well as the later version, which Yeats significantly revised. If you've put off buying an anthology such as this, now may be the time. ($35 / 566 pages / Scribner)

Editor Richard J. Finneran expands on earlier collected "The Yeats Reader." This edition includes not only Yeats many classic poems, but also plays, autobiographical writing and fiction. Perhaps most interestingly, there are six poems in which Finneran gives us what you might call "before and after" versions. That is, we see the initial version of "Leda and the Swan", first published in "The Dial" in 1924, as well as the later version, which Yeats significantly revised. If you've put off buying an anthology such as this, now may be the time. ($35 / 566 pages / Scribner)