William Butler Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in Stockholm in December 1923. This was an event that in many ways solidified Yeats’s place as one of the writers of the twentieth century, both home and abroad. The award placed him in the company of such luminaries as Rabindranath Tagore, Rudyard Kipling and Knut Hamsun, and later laureates have ranged from Samuel Beckett and Winston Churchill to Seamus Heaney and last year’s winner, Annie Ernaux. The award was an important event in Yeats’s life, associated both with the elevated (in Yeats’s memories of the lavish ceremony) and the mundane (as in anecdotes, such as the one involving the Yeats’s cooking sausages to celebrate the news of the award). Both Yeats’s lecture delivered to the Swedish Royal Academy, ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’, and his travelogue ‘The Bounty of Sweden’, are significant parts of his oeuvre, the former particularly due to the way in which he selectively singled
out Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge when commemorating ‘the labours, triumphs and troubles of my fellow-workers’ in the establishment of the Abbey Theatre.
This academic conference, organized in tandem by the International Yeats Society and the English Department at Stockholm University, will celebrate the centenary of Yeats’s award. We invite papers on a range of topics related to Yeats and the Nobel Prize, and we are especially interested in papers that address the theme of elevation.
As a post- or late Romantic, Yeats frequently associated his art with ideas of transcendence, even while his writings often were ironic about this matter or addressed complications or failed quests. The play At the Hawk’s Well is one of many examples of the latter, also involving Yeats’s characteristic linking of his art with the elevation of the flight of birds. The falcon of ‘The Second Coming’ is another famous instance. Yet Yeats also wrote, in ‘The Municipal Gallery Re visited,’ that ‘All that we did, all that we said or sang / Must come from contact with the soil, from that / Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong’.
Yeats’s desire for transcendence took a particular inflection through his lifelong engagement with mysticism and esoteric societies. A Vision is a particularly important expression of this dimension in Yeats’s writings, even if it can be traced throughout his oeuvre. There was always a religious dimension to his writings, even if he early on dismissed Victorian Christianity. Religious rituals and beliefs from a variety of cultures and contexts play an important role in his writings, involving him in what we might today describe as a ‘post-secular’ mode of thought and artistic expression.
The consecration of Yeats as one of the great writers of the twentieth century affected how other writers related to him. Traditionally, the status of being a master has involved having apprentices or followers –hence the Swedish elev and French élève. Yeats himself was not always sanguine about how such processes worked, as is evidenced by his poem ‘To a Poet, who would have me Praise certain Bad Poets, Imitators of His and Mine’. Yet ideas of influence and artistic affinity were key to his career, ranging from his collaborative efforts as part of the Irish Literary Revival, and his embrace of literary exemplars ranging from Rafferty to Shakespeare and the Romantics, to his theory of the mask. With regard to the latter, it is notable that Harold Bloom developed his own
theory of the anxiety of influence in close dialogue with Yeats’s ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’.
Plenary speakers:
– Roy Foster, Emeritus Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Professor of Irish History and Literature at Queen Mary University of London
– Margaret Mills Harper, Glucksman Professor in Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick
– Marjorie Howes, Associate Professor in English and Irish Studies, Boston College
– Paul Muldoon, Howard G.B. Clark ’21 University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University
This conference will enable participants to address a variety of topics, including but not limited to the following:
- Yeats and the Nobel Prize
- The influence and reception of Yeats – both in Scandinavia and elsewhere
- Yeats and the sacred
- Yeats and transcendence
- Yeats and tropes of elevation, including the flight of birds and tropes involving stars
- Yeats and the canon – for instance of either England, Ireland or other countries
- Yeats’s influence on the cultural milieu of his time
- Yeats as a public figure or intellectual
- The history of the Abbey Theatre
The conference will be an in-person event (i.e., there are no plans for online or hybrid components).
The conference will mainly take place on the premises of the University of Stockholm. There will also be some outings and events in other locations in the city of Stockholm, including the Town Hall of Stockholm and the Nobel Prize Museum in the Old Town of Stockholm. The conference fee will be 100 euros, covering the conference dinner as well as coffee and lunches.
Please forward paper proposals (20 minute papers, max 200 words abstracts) to the organising committee via Joakim Wrethed and Charles Armstrong by June 16. Contact Joakim Wrethed and
Charles Armstrong: joakim.wrethed@english.su.se and Charles.Armstrong@uia.no.
Please note that all participants must be payed-up members of the International Yeats Society. To sign up as a member, please use this link.
We are keen to support Doctoral students and unwaged academics. We do this by maintaining a reduced IYS membership fee for these groups and offering travel bursaries. If you would like to be
considered for an IYS travel bursary please include, along with the abstract for your conference paper, a maximum 200-word statement outlining your case for support. This should include detail about your current research project and the relevance of the conference themes to your ongoing work. All applications will be considered by the conference organising committee/ IYS Executive Board.
