From a new Irish stamp to a public reading by Fiona Shaw, global events in honour of ‘a great public and private poet’ begin
Open thread: which is your favourite Yeats poem?
The 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1923, is being marked this year with hundreds of events and celebrations around the world.
The author, whose poems took six out of the top 10 slots in a vote at the end of 1999 to find Ireland’s favourite poem, was born in Dublin on 13 June 1865. The year-long celebrations centre on a four-day festival in June in Sligo, the inspiration for much of Yeats’s poetry; one of Yeats’s best-known poems, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, is about an island on Lough Gill: “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.”
Related: WB Yeats: looming larger through the mists of time
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