Yeats Summer School: Beliefs and mythologies picked up by WB Yeats as a child in Sligo became one of the major influences on his life and work, writer Marie Heaney told the official opening of the 46th International Summer School at the weekend.
Ms Heaney said that in July 1872, Yeats came to Sligo with his mother for a two-week holiday and stayed for more than two years. "He was seven years old. The old adage 'give me a child of seven and I will give you the man' seems particularly apposite in this case," she said.
"The boy, preternaturally sensitive and highly imaginative, had arrived in a place that is considered, to this day, to give access into the mystical world of Celtic mythology and fairy lore, a world where there was a belief in a parallel reality."
Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, there was a great interest in the occult among the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.
"But at ground level, almost literally, there existed another, older system of belief, and that was the country people's conviction that another group of beings shared the terrain with them, their firm belief in the existence of what can be called the fairy world," she added.
It was to this belief, she said, that Yeats was introduced in those two crucially formative years in Sligo and it predisposed him, for ever after, to have a profound interest in the mystical and the occult.
"He fell in love with the Sligo countryside and his imagination was stirred by the stories about fairies and ghosts and banshees that he heard from his grandfather's servants and in the cottages that he visited," Ms Heaney said.
"He believed he saw a fairy himself outside his bedroom window and his mother, Susan, was convinced that she had heard a banshee the night before her three-year-old son died."
In The Celtic Twilight, he had remarked matter of factly that Drumcliffe and Rosses were "full of ghosts".
In the same work, he had quoted one of his main sources, Paddy Flynn, as saying that he was "annoyed" with fairies. In that context, Ms Heaney explained, the word "annoyed" meant "pestered".
Among those at the official opening in the Hawk's Well Theatre in Sligo town on Sunday were the poet's son, Michael Yeats, and the mayor of Sligo, Rosaleen O'Grady.
The school heard an address from Jonathan Allison of the University of Kentucky who described The Wild Swans at Coole as "autumnal and melancholy".
The poem was written 19 years after Yeats's first visit to Coole. "In drafts the poem ended with the more static image of "Passion or conquest, wander where they will/Attend upon them still" - an ending which focused on the swans, not the speaker's feelings.
Instead, by ending with the question "By what lake's edge or pool/Delight men's eyes, when I awake some day/To find they have flown away?", the poem ends uncertainly with the speaker's fears, his imagined grief, masked in pleasure for the delight they will bring someone else," Prof Allison said.