The 2025 Annual Joseph Hassett WB Yeats Lecture | Talk and Dialogue in Yeats’ Poetry
You are warmly invited to the 2025 Joseph Hassett Annual Yeats Lecture
The 2025 Annual Joseph Hassett WB Yeats Lecture
Talk and Dialogue in Yeats’ Poetry
Each year, with the support of lawyer, literary scholar and philanthropist Joseph Hassett, the National Library offers a keynote lecture marking the birth of WB Yeats on 13th June 1865.
The 2025 lecture will first consider 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 will focus 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’.
This year's lecture will be delivered by Professor Nicholas Grene, Fellow Emeritus, School of English, Trinity College Dublin.
Event details:
- Welcome reception in the front hall, Kildare Street Main Building (6-7pm)
- The lecture will take place in the Joly Theatre (7-8pm).
