2026 Wb Yeats Bedford Park Lecture

National Pride & National Vanity: Yeats, Art & Patriotism: the 2026 WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture with Fintan OToole.

Introduced by WB Yeats Bedford Park Project founder Cahal DallatAs a young Irish poet Yeats not only wrote some of his best-loved poems in Bedford Park but was commissioned by a Bedford Park neighbour to write his first staged play, which led to his part in founding Irelands world-famous Abbey Theatre, a critical element in the Irish cultural revival that, George Bernard Shaw insisted, was born in Bedford Park.

Fintan OToole has highlighted the role the Abbey played in achieving Irelands independence.

But when the new-born nation objected to the social realism of Sean OCaseys Easter Rising play The Plough and the Stars, staged at the Abbey a hundred years ago this year, Yeats made an important distinction between the national pride he & his poetry & drama helped inspire, & national vanity, the effects of which OToole discerns in todays local & international politics.Author, editor, literary critic, historian, political commentator & author of over twenty books, Fintan OToole (identified by The Observer as one of Britains leading intellectuals despite not being British or living in Britain), is drama critic for The Irish Times, Advising Editor & contributor for The New York Review of Books, former New York Daily News drama critic & former visiting lecture at Princeton University.