W.B Yeats – The Last Romantic

A Symposium Celebrating Yeats’s Sesquicentenary (Yeats2015) was organised by The Embassy of Ireland in Malta and the University of Malta.

In collaboration with the University of Malta’s English department the Embassy of Ireland in Malta organised a half day conference and reception entitled ‘W.B Yeats – The Last Romantic’, a symposium celebrating Yeats’s sesquicentenary as part of the Yeats2015 events in Malta.

The conference included lectures by University of Malta’s Dr Maria Frendo on ‘“Tread gently because you tread on my dreams”: Yeats and the Dancer’, Dr James Corby’s ‘Death-in-life and life-in-death: Yeats’s Romanticism’ as well as special guest speaker, Professor Michael O’Neill from the University of Durham, on ‘Yeats’s Endings’.

The conference was held at the University of Malta’s Valletta campus’ Aula Magna Hall followed by a short reception at The Fortress Builder’s Fortification Centre, also in Valletta.

The reception included a reading of a selection of Yeats’s poems in Maltese, deftly translated by Ms Elizabeth Galea. These included ‘It-Tieni Miġja’ (The Second Coming), ‘Fi Triqti Lejn Biżanżju’ (Sailing to Byzantium). ‘Meta tkun xjaħt’ (When you are old) and ‘Ebda Trojja Oħra’ (No Second Troy).

The Fortress Builder’s Fortification centre was also the venue in which the Yeats’s 2015 mobile exhibition was displayed for the month of September.

The event was attended by students and lecturers from the Department of English at the University of Malta, the Australian High Commissioner H.E. Ms Jane Elspeth Lambert, Deputy British High Commissioner Mr Jonathan Knight and the Ghanaian High Commissioner H.E. Mr. Kenneth Enos Korfi Tachie as well as other guests of the Embassy.

A limited number of commemorative booklets are available upon request.