On Wednesday, May 18th during free hour (12:15 – 1:30) in the Benjamin Rosenthal Library President’s Conference Room 2 (5th floor) Jeff Cassvan, Acting Director of Irish Studies, will discuss the continuing relevance of William Butler Yeats’s great elegy “Easter, 1916”. The poem will be considered in light of the tradition of the English elegy, in the context of some of Yeats’s major thematic and aesthetic preoccupations, and as a work that makes palpable his insight that “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

This event is in conjunction with the current exhibit in the Barham Rotunda Gallery A Nation Rising: The 100th Anniversary of the 1916 Irish Rebellion.