2026 WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture
National Pride & National Vanity: Yeats, Art & Patriotism:
The 2026 WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture, with Fintan O’Toole.
Introduced by WB Yeats Bedford Park Project founder Cahal Dallat
As a young Irish poet Yeats not only wrote some of his best-loved poems in Bedford Park but was commissioned by a Bedford Park neighbour to write his first staged play, which led to his part in founding Ireland’s world-famous Abbey Theatre, a critical element in the Irish cultural revival that, George Bernard Shaw insisted, was born in Bedford Park. Fintan O’Toole has highlighted the role the Abbey played in achieving Ireland’s independence. But when the new-born nation objected to the social realism of Sean O’Casey’s ‘Easter Rising’ play The Plough and the Stars, staged at the Abbey a hundred years ago this year, Yeats made an important distinction between the ‘national pride’ he & his poetry & drama helped inspire, & ‘national vanity’, the effects of which O’Toole discerns in today’s local & international politics.
The speaker:
Author, editor, literary critic, historian, political commentator & author of over twenty books, Fintan O’Toole has been identified by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading intellectuals, despite not being British or living in Britain. He is drama critic for The Irish Times, Advising Editor & contributor for The New York Review of Books, former New York Daily News drama critic & former visiting lecture at Princeton University.
Sponsored by the Clayton Hotel Chiswick. Books on sale by Everybody Reads.
Organised by the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project.
