The Irish tradition has been dying for 400 years, yet it is still very much alive, according to Prof Declan Kiberd of University College Dublin.
He was lecturing to the Yeats Summer School yesterday on Yeats, Synge and the Bardic Tradition.
Following the end of the bardic schools in 1600, the poets had to deal with how to fit a mandarin tradition into a more vulgar reality, a dilemma with which Yeats identified, he said.
In the 1890s, Yeats wrote with envy of the power of the old bards, and the bardic tradition of praise and blame came rather easily to him.
Synge loved to draw on their satiric tradition in his plays. Some critics had placed Synge's poems in the English cavalier tradition, he said, but Prof Kiberd read one of Synge's poems, a curse, which called for blisters to rise on the face of its victim, and pointed out that no cavalier tradition believed in the power of poetry to raise blisters on its victims' faces.
The persona the poet adopted, which included both a social function and a tradition of oratory, came from this bardic tradition.
Like Yeats, Synge was appalled by the lack of technical rigour among the Young Ireland poets, and was deeply familiar with the detailed rules of bardic poetry, which included very complex alliteration, syllabic rhyme and rigorous rules of decoration Prof Kiberd explained.
This tradition was also very fond of lists, and this was taken up by Yeats in his poem, Easter 1916.
The first part of the poem lists the warrior dead, thereby fulfilling the first duty of a bardic poet. But, reflecting his modernism, the poet also speaks in a personal capacity, asking himself what these people have just done.
Prof Kiberd also stressed the importance of music and reading aloud in this tradition. The bardic poems, though written by a file (poet), were read by a reagaire (literally "reciter") to accompaniment by a harp. They were not sung. After the break-up of the bardic school, the harp was no longer used, and the music was incorporated into the poems.
In his critical writings, Synge describes how poems must be recited in public. This was also his approach to his plays, and the actress Maire Nic Ulaigh described how she read the lines over and over to find their internal cadences and rhythm.
Synge personally supervised the production of the plays, but was not much help with the recitation, because he felt that the rhythms came from out of the lines themselves.
Synge and Yeats were not the only Irish writers of the time who relied on the spoken word. Prof Kiberd recalled that, when asked to explain a passage of Ulysses, Joyce said: "Try reading it aloud".
Indeed, both he and Synge were thwarted musicians. Joyce had been beaten by John McCormack at the Dublin Feis Ceoil, from which his singing aspirations never recovered, and Synge wanted to play the violin in public, but was too shy.
A file was also a seer, a prophet, one who interpreted the state of the kingdom and looked into the future, and Yeats also sought to fulfil this role. "Yeats always had a developed sense of the future," he said.
Prof Helen Vendler from Harvard, another former director of the school, examined Yeats's technique in detail, analysing the meters and rhymes in a number of poems and identifying the poetic forms that dominated his work.
She told The Irish Times that she first read Yeats in 1955, as part of a course on Victorian poetry, and in 1960 completed her doctoral dissertation on him. This was published by Harvard University Press soon afterwards, following the recommendation of her mentor, Prof John Kelleher.
She has been coming to Sligo for some 20 years, and first heard Seamus Heaney read at the Yeats Summer School in 1974. She asked for a copy of the poems he had read, and when they were published as the collection, North she reviewed it for the New York Book Review.
"I have been writing about him every since," she said. "He is always coming up with new surprises in his work.
"I keep coming back and meeting new poets here. I met John Hewitt here, John Montague, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon and others, as well as Seamus Heaney. I wouldn't have met them in the normal line of things."