Professor Nicholas Grene delivered the 2025 Annual Joseph Hassett WB Yeats Lecture on the subject of ‘Talk and Dialogue in Yeats’ Poetry’ at the National Library of Ireland (NLI) on 13 June 2025.
Every summer, literary scholar and philanthropist, Joseph Hassett, supports a public lecture at the National Library on the occasion of WB Yeats’ birthday (13 June 1865). A guest lecturer is invited each year to speak to a different aspect of Yeats work.
The 2025 lecture was delivered by Professor Nicholas Grene, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Trinity College Dublin and explored the subject of ‘Talk and Dialogue in Yeats’ Poetry’.
Professor Grene’s lecture first considered the ways Yeats uses talk in his poems: the casual exchanges with the rebel leaders in ‘Easter 1916’, and with the rival combatants in ‘The Road at My Door’ from ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, the orchestrated conversations of ‘The Folly of Being Comforted’ and ‘Adam’s Curse’.
The second part of the lecture focused on dialogues between separate named voices: argument in ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’, love talk in ‘Solomon and Sheba’, ending with the poet’s internal debates, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, ‘Vacillation’, and ‘Man and the Echo’.
Learn more on the NLI’s website: https://www.nli.ie/2025HassettYeatsLecture
The lecture was recorded and is available to watch on the NLI’s YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/H6KWzZVYGMc?feature=shared