Sailing to Byzantium - A One-Day Voyage in the Company of W B Yeats
Jules Cashford and James Harpur will conduct a study day on W. B.Yeats, one of Ireland’s greatest poets.
Born in Sligo in 1865, Yeats was central to the Irish literary revival at the end of the 19th century and a force behind the nationalist drive towards Irish independence. More than that, Yeats was a profound spiritual poet who drew inspiration from the great mythic tradition of the anima mundi, connecting himself to past thinkers and poets such as Plato, Plotinus, Blake and Swedenborg.
Jules and James will explore different aspects of Yeats’s varied life and poetry in a one-day session of four one-hour talks, two in the morning, two in the afternoon. There will also be opportunity for questions and discussion in a friendly but focused atmosphere.
Itinerary:
- James Harpur: The Life and Work of Yeats
- Jules Cashford: ‘Whatever the passions of man have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the Great Memory’
Lunch break
- James Harpur: The Wanderings of Oisin: An Exhilarating Journey to the Otherworld
- Jules Cashford: Imagining a Second Self: Yeats and the Daimon
Jules Cashford was educated at St Andrews and Cambridge universities. She is a Fellow of the Temenos Academy and has lectured for Temenos on the Egyptian and Greek Mysteries, Wolfram’s Parzival, and Imagination in Blake, Coleridge and Yeats.
James Harpur is a poet and poetry editor of the Temenos Academy Review. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied Yeats. He lives in Ireland in a landscape of fairy forts, bogs and lakes of the sort that inspired Yeats’s imagination.
