William Butler Yeats

Well, it was St. Patrick’s Day yesterday, and despite our Irish heritage — or perhaps because of our Irish heritage — we tried to avoid stories such as the one about Barack Obama being secretly Irish, there were some interesting stories being told on the Irish literary front, such as this one by Marese McDonagh from the Irish Times about how natives of County Sligo, Ireland, are aggressively apathetic to the hometown poet who immortalized them, W. B Yeats.

McDonagh reports the local government has consistently refused to support the famous Yates Summer School program, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary of bringing in hundreds of scholars and poets; threatened the demolition of significant sites; and refused to place landmark signs on others of the man who made Sligo famous as the “land of heart’s desire.” McDonagh notes that “As far as the Yeats Society is concerned,” the attitude “underlines an apathy, if not a downright hostility.”