Yeats Lecture & Poetry Reading – Meg Harper, Paul Muldoon & Lars-Håkan Svensson

Lecture ‘And I myself created Hanrahan’: Dissensual Irishness in late Yeats by Margaret Mills Harper, Glucksman Professor in Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

My research focuses on modern and contemporary Irish, US, and world literature in English, especially poetry. I am a specialist on W. B. Yeats, especially his occult life and work. My book The Aristocracy of Art looks at the rhetoric of autobiographical fiction and its relationship to the issue of class in James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe. Wisdom of Two, my second book, analyses the spiritual and literary collaboration of W. B. and his wife George (Hyde Lees), especially their experiments with automatic writing. I have also been part of teams that have produced scholarly editions of the Yeatses’ automatic writing and other occult experiments and the two versions of Yeats’ book of esoteric philosophy, A Vision (1925 and 1937). I have served as Director of the Yeats International Summer School (2013-15) and as President of the International Yeats Society (2013-17).

Poetry reading by Paul Muldoon, Poet & Howard G.B. Clark & University Professor in the Humanities; Professor of Creative Writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts; Director, Princeton Atelier; Co-Chair, Fund for Irish Studies.

The reading will be done together with Lars-Håkan Svensson who has translated Muldoon into Swedish. Some poems will be read in Swedish.

“To describe Paul Muldoon’s influence on contemporary poetry is like trying to assess the influence of The Beatles on post-war music: it’s to be seen and heard in the work of almost every British and Irish poet since the 1970’s.”

— The Irish Post

Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet and professor of poetry, as well as an editor, critic, playwright, lyricist and translator. Born in 1951 in Portadown, Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, to Patrick Muldoon, a farm labourer and market gardener, and Brigid Regan, a schoolteacher, Paul Muldoon was brought up near a village called The Moy on the border of counties Armagh and Tyrone. Muldoon is the author of fourteen full-length collections of poetry, including Howdie-Skelp (2021), Frolic and Detour (2019), One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Maggot (2010), Horse Latitudes (2006), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Hay (1998), The Annals of Chile (1994), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), Meeting the British (1987), Quoof (1983), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Mules (1977) and New Weather (1973). He has also published innumerable smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics, and radio and television drama. His poetry has been translated into twenty languages.

I samarbete med Stockholms universitet, The International Yeats Society, The Irish Embassy in Stockholm, Rönnells Vänner, Kulturrådet, Stockholms stad och Humlegården Fastigheter.