Robert Graves and Ireland: A Symposium
Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry
Queen’s University Belfast
Friday 25th November 2011
Robert Graves (1895-1985), poet, novelist and memoirist, son of the Irish
Literary Revival writer Alfred Perceval Graves, visited Ireland three times – in
1918, when he was stationed in Limerick following service on the Western
Front, in 1928, to seek out Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs in Sligo, and in 1975,
when he was elected to the Royal Irish Academy. Author of The White Goddess
(1948), which has been described as ‘the last product of the Irish Literary
Revival’, and a poet whose work, as he claimed himself in 1959, ‘remains true
to the Anglo-Irish tradition into which I was born’, Robert Graves had a
profound influence on the generation of Irish poets who began writing in the
1950s and 1960s, an influence matched by his own indebtedness to Irish
literature and Celtic scholarship.
Confirmed speakers include: John Montague; Mary Ann Constantine
(University of Wales); Gerald Dawe (Trinity College Dublin); Patrick Crotty
(University of Aberdeen); Michael McAteer (Queen’s University Belfast).
Papers are invited on all aspects of Robert Graves’s relations to Ireland and Irish
letters. Abstracts (no more than 250 words) should be sent by 30 June 2011 to
Dr Fran Brearton (f.brearton@qub.ac.uk), School of English, Queen’s
University Belfast, BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland.
Thursday 24th November: poetry reading by John Montague,
8pm, QUB/Crescent Arts Centre. Admission Free.
For further information and to register see:
http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SeamusHeaneyCentreforPoetry/