This article was written by Jennifer Eisenlau
"You got to go there, to know there", wrote Zora Neale Hurston. Although this African-American writer does not automatically evoke Ireland's patron-poet, Hurston's words are a compelling command for any serious student of William Butler Yeats. If you want to truly comprehend the poetry of Yeats, and I mean all of Yeats at his most concretely Irish self, you must visit Ireland. Without seeing, touching, walking -- and even drinking -- in his footsteps, your understanding of this Nobel Prize winner's work will be incomplete.
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I had a Joycean epiphany at Thoor Ballylee, Yeats' Tower in County Galway. Yeats and his family lived in Gort from 1917 to 1929. The tower is a 16th century castle fortress that sits along a fast-moving river, near the estate of Lady Gregory, his compatriot in the Celtic Revival. Purchased for �?�£35, Yeats restored the tower to a livable condition. On a wall facing the dirt road, there is a dedication, inscribed into a stone tablet:
I, the poet William Yeats,
With old millboards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.
Although I had been to Ireland more than ten times in a time span of five years, I never thought to visit to the rock fortress out in that small County Galway town. I assumed I would learn nothing from an old pile of rocks. I was, after all, a PhD candidate with Yeats on her orals reading list -- and I have an Irish Nana, to boot. What could a tower tell me that books and my professors could not?
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