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We Will Arise and Go Now

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07/06/2015

BBC Radio 4 - We Will Arise and Go Now

Marie-Louise Muir arises and goes with three Irish poets to the Lake Isle of Innisfree.

On the 150th anniversary of the birth of WB Yeats, presenter Marie-Louise Muir arises and goes with three Irish poets to the real Lake Isle of Innisfree in County Sligo.

On the 150th anniversary of WB Yeats' birth, Irish Chair of Poetry Paula Meehan, selects three Irish poets who will arise and go with presenter Marie-Louise Muir to The Lake Isle of Innisfree in County Sligo, a location made famous by Yeats's iconic poem of the same name. 

Elayne Harrington, aka 'Temper-Mental Miss-Elayneous' is a hip-hop poet and spoken word artist from Dublin; Stephen Sexton a PhD student at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast; Paula Cunningham was brought up in Omagh, County Tyrone, and works as a part-time dentist.

While Yeats's poem speaks of a desire to build 'a cabin of clay and wattles' on Innisfree, Marie-Louise and our three poets will be sleeping under canvas and cooking on a campfire. As they discover if the reality of this tiny uninhabited island on Lough Gill lives up to the bucolic idyll which Yeats so famously portrayed, they'll ask if 'peace comes dropping slow' in the 'bee loud glade' as they each reflect on how The Lake Isle of Innisfree resonates with them and come up with their own poetic responses to it.

Produced by Conor Garrett.

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