Roy Foster To Give Inaugural WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture

Event concludes year of celebration of 'London-Irish' schoolboy


Professor Roy Foster. Picture: QMUL

November 5, 2023

The first ever WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture is to be given by Professor Roy Foster, the poet’s official biographer.

The talk is part of the centenary celebrations for the award to Yeats of the Nobel Prize for Literature which was made in Stockholm on 10 December 1923.

R.F. Foster FBA FRHistS FRSL is former Carroll Professor at Hertford College, Oxford and author, as Yeats’s official biographer, of the two-volume WB Yeats, A Life — The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 and The Arch Poet 1915-1939

The talk is hosted by Chiswick Book Festival, in aid of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project and will take place on Thursday 14 December at St Michael & All Angels Church, Chiswick (W4 1TT) which was the Yeats family’s parish Church.

Cahal Dallat, the poet who was a driving force to have a statue honouring Yeats in Bedford Park said, “RF Foster's lecture concludes 2023's celebration of our ‘local’ London-Irish schoolboy who became not only a senator in the new Ireland for which his Celtic Revival, begun here in Bedford Park, laid the cultural foundations, but one of the world's best-loved poets (‘greatest poet of our times’ according to TS Eliot), an outstanding figure in 20th-century English literature, and the only poet raised in Britain to win the Nobel Prize.”

The year saw the launch of a Ciaran Hinds narrated smartphone trail, a Yeats-Birthday Poetry Evening with Marina Warner, a talk on Dorothy Wellesley by her grand-daughter, author Jane Wellesley, at Chiswick Book Festival, and the unveiling of Conrad Shawcross's #EnwroughtLight artwork.

Tickets to the talk cost £15 and can be bought online.

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