Fodor's Expert Review Yeats Building
The Yeats Society made major updates to its imposing building on Hyde Bridge in 2018, reinventing the displays for a fresh new experience all carried out in time for the 60th-anniversary celebrations the following year. A stylish permanent exhibition, Yeats and the Western World, honors the poet, providing an insight into the influence that both the Irish West and North America played in W. B. Yeats's life and work. The poet visited Canada and the United States on five occasions, lunching with President Theodore Roosevelt in Washington and speaking to members of the Press Club, Authors' Club, and the Arts Club. The exhibition also features a mock-up of an Edwardian drawing room, including the desk owned by the Yeatses' sister Lily.
In 2019, the Society was gifted a significant acquisition of a previously unseen color film of Yeats's funeral in Sligo in 1948. Although the poet died in France in January 1939, his remains were repatriated nearly a decade later to their final... READ MORE
The Yeats Society made major updates to its imposing building on Hyde Bridge in 2018, reinventing the displays for a fresh new experience all carried out in time for the 60th-anniversary celebrations the following year. A stylish permanent exhibition, Yeats and the Western World, honors the poet, providing an insight into the influence that both the Irish West and North America played in W. B. Yeats's life and work. The poet visited Canada and the United States on five occasions, lunching with President Theodore Roosevelt in Washington and speaking to members of the Press Club, Authors' Club, and the Arts Club. The exhibition also features a mock-up of an Edwardian drawing room, including the desk owned by the Yeatses' sister Lily.
In 2019, the Society was gifted a significant acquisition of a previously unseen color film of Yeats's funeral in Sligo in 1948. Although the poet died in France in January 1939, his remains were repatriated nearly a decade later to their final resting place in Drumcliff churchyard. The amateur footage, filmed by musician Jimmy Garvey, who never published it, was discovered in a box and passed to his nephew who donated it to the Society. The three-minute film shows local dignitaries, clergymen, and members of the Yeats family (including W. B.'s brother Jack) at Drumcliff and is now a permanent and treasured part of the exhibition.
The society appointed Dan Mulhall, Irish ambassador to the United States, as its new honorary president in 2019. He has had a lifelong love of Yeats's poetry and has spoken at the summer school on several occasions. The building remains an active hub for lectures, poetry readings, discussion, and literary events, and is home to the Yeats International Summer School conducted here every August since 1959. On the first floor, a gallery hosts a rotating exhibition of contemporary art. Research scholars can explore the Yeats Reference Library, which has more than 3,000 titles. While the ground floor café is currently shut, the Yeats Building is within walking distance of cafés, pubs, and restaurants.
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