Reading in the room - a glimpse from Dublin

 

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Dublin for the first time, and participated in a seminar (for more on which, see previous blogpost). I have been wanting to visit Ireland for a long time, and as - I believe - most Europeans I have grown up with a range of different cultural impulses that have shaped my idea of the country, its history, and its culture. Thanks to these impulses, Ireland is to me synonymous with books, and one of my priorities was to purchase a collection of Irish poetry. However, I also went about this mission with a certain apprehension about the necessity to keep a certain balance between my enthusiasm for Irish literature in general, and the rather appalling tendency to romanticize and exoticize Ireland, its inhabitants, and its cultural heritage. I wanted to avoid falling into generalizing raptures about how Ireland is a land of letters and how ubiquitous poetry is there. Largely I was successful in this, although Dublin itself did its best to sway me, such as when I walked past a farrier in an alley, over whose door was written a quotation from Seamus Heaney's poem 'The Forge'. 

In the end, I did go to Hogges Figges, and quite excitedly sought out their poetry selection. I was not entirely sure what to expect, so I was ecstatic to find an annotated facsimile of the first edition of William Butler Yeats' collection The Tower. Not only is it a beautiful book, but, more importantly, it was a complete volume of verse, something I have struggled to find in the case of Yeats, since his popularity has ensured that there have been printed many selections and incomplete anthologies, while his individual books have been more neglected. Overjoyed by this find, I went to a pub and sat down to have a cup of tea, whiling away the time in a very pleasant way before meeting a friend for lunch. It was a short while, about half an hour, but there was something at once so quintessential and yet unromanticized about the feeling of reading Yeats in a pub which etched the memory into my brain.