The 2024 Joseph Hassett Yeats Lecture

Writing to Lady Gregory from London in the week of April 24, 1916, W.B. Yeats worried briefly about the “tragic business” of the Easter Rising before turning to the other matter which was pressing on his mind: the money Augusta Gregory had lent him to pay for improvements to the bathroom of his London apartment had arrived safely, enabling him to order a new bath with all the fittings. 

This talk will explore Yeats’s relationship to things - furnishings, objects, possessions - as they appear in his letters and, in a more obtuse manner, in his meditations on ideas of home, of identity and of belonging in the poetry. Some of the actual objects of Yeats’s homes will also be looked at. 

Belinda McKeon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright. She is the author of the novels Solace (2011) and Tender (2015), and has had short fiction and non-fiction published in The Paris Review, Granta, Winter Papers, A Public Space, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. Her plays have been produced in Dublin and New York.

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 lecture is inspired by the National Library’s long-running exhibition The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats, which showcases the largest collection of Yeats material in the world, including his Nobel Prize medal.

Host or Publisher National Library of Ireland