2025 Annual Hassett WB Yeats Lecture

Every summer, literary scholar and philanthropist, Joseph Hassett, supports a public lecture at the National Library on the occasion of WB Yeats' birthday (13th June 1865). A guest lecturer is invited each year to speak to a different aspect of Yeats work.

The 2025 lecture was delivered by Professor Nicholas Grene, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and explored the subject of 'Talk and Dialogue in Yeats’ Poetry'. 

In her opening remarks, NLI Director, Dr Audrey Whitty, expressed sincere thanks to Mr Hassett for his enduring generosity in supporting this annual event since 2013. She said, "Joe’s enduring commitment to Yeats’ legacy and to the National Library helps make this event possible, not just in this room, but online, where it reaches a wider audience in Ireland and around the world".

The booked-out event welcomed a large crowd for a reception in the front hall at Kildare Street, followed by the lecture in the newly renovated Joly Theatre. Guests included a number of past keynote speakers including Professor Margaret Kelleher (2023), Theo Dorgan (2021) and Paula Meehan (2016).

Professor Grene's lecture first considered the ways Yeats uses talk in his poems: the casual exchanges with the rebel leaders in ‘Easter 1916’, and with the rival combatants in ‘The Road at My Door’ from ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, the orchestrated conversations of ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’ and ‘Adam’s Curse’.  

The second part of the lecture focused on dialogues between separate named voices: argument in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’, love talk in ‘Solomon and Sheba’, ending with the poet’s internal debates, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, ‘Vacillation’, and ‘Man and the Echo’. 

The lecture was recorded and will be made available online in the coming weeks. Discover more past lectures on the NLI YouTube channel here.