DETAILS
Wednesday 12th November 2025 at 4:00pm (AEDT)
Prof James Chandler, University of Chicago
Yeats and the Poetry of ‘Romantic Ireland’
ABSTRACT
‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave’. Yeats once called himself ‘the last Romantic’, but the curious thing about his famous refrain in ‘September 1913’ is that none of the Romantics he memorializes there are actually poets. Not Edward Fitzgerald, not Wolfe Tone, not Robert Emmet, and not John O’Leary himself. What was Yeats’s relationship to the Irish poets who were writing around the turn of the 19th century? How did Yeats regard Thomas Moore, the most famous of them, whose unofficial role as Ireland’s national poet Yeats would lay claim to? What did Yeats’s own Romantic canon look like? What were its blind spots?
SPEAKER
Prof. Chandler’s research and teaching interests include the Romantic movement; the study of lyric poetry; the history of the novel; relations between politics and literature, history and criticism; the Scottish Enlightenment; modern Irish literature and culture; the sentimental mode; cinema studies; and the history of humanities disciplines. He is the author of three books on English Romanticism: Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984), England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, which won the 2000 Gordon J. Laing Award for distinction in academic publishing, and An Archeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (2013), which examines continuities between the Romantic culture of sentiment and twentieth-century film. In 2024 he was made an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy.
LOCATION (In-Person only)
4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, Gratton St, University of Melbourne.