Yeats, Heaney, MacNeice and the ‘dignification’ of death

Annual Robert Welch Memorial Lecture in Irish Literature by Professor Terence Brown, Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin

In this lecture Professor Brown will consider how three Irish poets made death a poetic subject.

It will be shown how Yeats in his final years wrote of the possibility of a 'true death', of the 'dignification' of death. Heaney's critique of Philip Larkin's famous poem 'Aubade' will be read in the light of his admiration for and engagement with key Yeats poems.

It will be argued too that MacNeice, also influenced by Yeats, developed a personal philosophy of death which inspired poems. The lecture will conclude with a critical reading of his posthumously published volume The Burning Perch and of his poem 'Charon'.

This lecture is open to everyone.