Culture Night at Yeats & the West

Friday 18th September 5-9pm

Tours, talks, & more!

Free admission

Yeats & the West tells the story of the places and the people that made a western cultural revolution. Discover what the west meant to Yeats, and what this means to us.

Culture Night at Yeats & the West features extended opening hours until 9pm, free admission, and exclusive tours every hour on the hour at 5pm, 6pm, 7pm, and 8pm, by exhibition curators Adrian Paterson and Barry Houlihan.

It also features a new arrangement and rotation of items on display, and unique and personal access to material in special collections. Among many new selections specially on view for this week are:

A new selection of first editions: Yeats’s first book, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), so admired by William Morris, and his book of symbolist stories set in Irish landscapes The Secret Rose (1897), illustrated by a spectacular Rosicrucian tree design in gilt and leather binding by Althea Gyles.

An entirely new display of Cuala Press books, all first editions, from W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Frank O’Connor, with illustrations by Elizabeth Rivers.

Poems about the Easter Rising by Dermot O’Byrne – actually the pseudonym of English composer Arnold Bax, whose tone poems based on Yeats’s poetry can be heard in the audio-visual part of the exhibition.

Collected Works of J.M. Synge edited by W.B. Yeats, and a deluxe edition of The Playboy of the Western World with colour illustrations by Sean Keating.

A new selection of exquisitely handcoloured Broadsides by Jack B. Yeats, Seamus O’Sullivan, and others, and a early book of Jack B. Yeats containing his early children’s theatre designs and even a pirate treasure map!

Also featuring as ever original artwork by Jack B. Yeats, Gerard Dillon, Fergus Bourke and Nicholas Feve. Manuscripts, rare books, music, video, and exclusive archival material from Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, and even the American west.

In this decade of commemorations come and find out more about the man who shaped and commented on the whole revolutionary decade. Discover the collaborations and collisions that formed modern Ireland, and deepened our culture.

All this at Yeats & the West. The exhibition runs until December.