W.B. Yeats and the Irish Free State

History Ireland

A century ago, in December 1922, at the height of the Civil War, poet W.B. Yeats was nominated to the Senate of the newly established Irish Free State. In January of that year he had participated in the cultural programme of the Irish Race Congress in Paris. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, a major boost to the prestige of a nation after the trauma of civil war. He was to serve for six years in the Senate. In the 1930s he briefly flirted with Eoin O’Duffy’s Blueshirts. How are we to assess Yeats’s relationship to the Irish Free State? To address this and other questions, join History Ireland editor Tommy Graham in discussion with Lucy Collins, Theo Dorgan, Darragh Gannon and Katherine McSharry.

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This Hedge School supported by the National Library of Ireland.