I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and
Wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for
The honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade?.

Then there's the public side of Yeats' poetry, which stirred a new nation, and the mystical side, which pits the physical against the spiritual.

Many roads can lead one to Yeats, but every August they all seem to meet here in County Sligo, Ireland, where an intensive, two-week summer school devoted to the poet has been held since 1960. Summer schools?intensive programs that draw scholars and lay students alike?are a popular institution in Ireland, and the Yeats International Summer School is the best known of all.

"You see all types here," says Warwick Gould, a guest lecturer from the University of London's School of Advanced Studies. "There are old ladies, Ph.D. students, and my favorite?that most mythical of creatures,
the common reader."

Most of the nearly 100 students were drawn to Yeats' poetry long before they ever saw the flat-topped mountain known as Ben Bulben in the slanted northern light, or the purple-heathered shore of Innisfree, or the unspoiled sweep of beach at nearby Rosses Point, or Yeats' simple grave at Drumcliffe Church. During his youth, Yeats spent many summers visiting relatives near Sligo, a lively town of 25,000 on Ireland's northwestern coast. Its inlets and meadows and limestone cliffs inspired him until his death in 1939. "I longed for a sod of earth from some field that I knew," he once wrote, "something of Sligo to hold in my hand."

To study Yeats amid the landscape he loved is an added pleasure. So is drinking pints of Guinness in the dark warren of booths at Hargadon's. But Yeats' language is the main reason people come here. His words are alive. His spirit inhabits the place. "Once you start Yeats, you never give him up," says Christina Feasley, who teaches high-school English in Sarasota, Fla.

Eugene Gilmartin, also from Sarasota, first read Yeats in the 1950's. "Then," he says, using a Yeats line, "I went into the greasy till." Now retired from an advertising career, he is pursuing Yeats again.

This is a third time Youngman Kim, a South Korean professor who helped establish a Yeats Society in his home country, has attended. He comes for the new scholarly perspectives, the camaraderie of the pubs, the cadences of the Irish accent.

Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865. The son of a prominent artist, he abandoned art school for literature. He collected Celtic folk tales, wrote poems and plays, and immersed himself in the cultural politics of a nation struggling for independence. He helped found an Irish national theater and, above all, a national literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.

Yeats had a deep interest in magic and the occult, a theme explored by scholars only relatively recently. His wife introduced him to automatic writing?writing inspired by the supernatural.
The summer school is operated by the Yeats Society Sligo. Every morning there are two lectures given by well-known Yeats scholars. You could hear Margaret Mills Harper of Georgia State University discuss the mystical symbolism of "A Vision." (Her father, the Yeats scholar George Mill Harper, taught at the summer school when she was a child.) Or Ronald Schuchard of Emory University, part of a group that's editing Yeats'
letters, talk about his late poems. Or Jonathan Allison of the University of Kentucky (he's the summer school's assistant director and a native of Northern Ireland) speak on Yeats and the British war poet Wilfred Owen.

In the afternoons, students attend small seminars. They might read "Meditations in Time of Civil War" with Terence Brown, a professor at Trinity College, in Dublin, who has just published a biography of Yeats. Or they might explore mortality and immortality in "The Two Kings" with Mr. Gould.

There is also a drama workshop, which will stage Yeats' play The Resurrection.

In the evenings the group congregates in the pub of the Silver Swan Hotel. There is laughter and smoke, scholarly debate and impromptu entertainment. One night a South Korean professor recites his own epic poem, then sings "Santa Lucia" in Italian. An American scholar takes out her fiddle, while a guitarist strums a Yeats poem set to music.

"It's very academic and simultaneously very social," says David Cregan, an American who's a master's-degree student at Trinity. "It's very Irish."

To George Watson, a University of Aberdeen scholar and the school's director, the social side helps cement the academic goals. Mr. Watson, who is from Northern Ireland, looks for a strong "midfield"?outgoing colleagues who add energy. It's no good having a bunch of academics who retire early to bed," he says.

In between scheduled activities are poetry readings, harp recitals, and field trips?especially to the mountain that inspired the poem "Under Ben Bulben." Yeats wrote the last three lines as his epitaph, and everyone here seems to know it by heart. Here's the final verse:

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

On the final day, the visiting professors hold a question-and-answer session. There is talk about whether local tourism groups have over-commodified Yeats. ("I will arise and go now? on board the Wild Rose Water bus" one brochure reads.) Then there's the pesky issue of that other Irish writer, James Joyce, who appears on the 10-pound bill and inspires bigger Bloomsday festivals each year. Someone wonders if Yeats is as user-friendly as Joyce. Someone else responds that the dense Ulysses may be the most popular novel never read.

Maura McTighe of Sligo, who until recently was president of the Yeats Society, has no worries about Yeats' status. She first read his work in college, since her Roman Catholic school didn't teach the Protestant poet. Over a quick lunch at Hargadon's, she boils down his appeal. "He says one thing in one poem, than another thing in another poem a few years later, and isn't that what life is all about?"

Then comes the familiar refrain, wrapped in a lilting brogue: "Of course it is. "

The summer school's final event is the performance of The Resurrection, directed by Sam McCready, actor and theater professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His philosophy is to work with what he has, so everyone gets a part. He has staged a play-within-a-play: A contemporary group of college students are reading The Resurrection, in which characters from ancient societies witness Christ's resurrection as the dawning of a new era. The students decide to act the play out themselves, blurring the lines between art and life. The play incorporates the talents of a young Irish step dancer who's in the workshop, and a chorus of drummers that reflects Yeats' interest in the Japanese Noh theater.

Afterward, in the lobby of the Hawk's Well Theatre, Mr. Brown of Trinity is wistful. He was touched by how the professor in the play, having done his job well, stepped aside as his students took over the text. "Ah, that's something for a teacher to hope for, isn't it?" Mr. Brown says.

Of course it is.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 29, 2000, page A64