The National Library of Ireland is offering a virtual tour of the exhibition “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats” on the award-winning Yeats Exhibition homepage.

The notebook of one of Ireland’s most famous poets is one of thousands of objects in an exhibition titled “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats” at the National Library of Ireland. Next to its display case the entire notebook has been digitally reincarnated. With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry.

The exhibition is more like a life-size, walk-through Web site than an ordinary museum show. With audiotapes, four short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries. You can also take a virtual tour of the exhibition by visiting the award-winning Yeats Exhibition homepage.

At its core the exhibition offers Yeats’s papers not as relics but as living documents. The visitor sees a manuscript of “Sailing to Byzantium”. Next to the display a digital tutorial shows how he kneaded the words and notions of the poem. Only in later drafts did he find a streak of lightning to open the poem: “That is no country for old men.” Elsewhere software developed by the British Library allows visitors to page through digitized manuscripts.

The exhibition has been described in The Irish Times as “one of the most important literary exhibitions yet staged internationally”. It opened in 2006 and will run until January, then move to the United States if the library can find a suitable host.

Read more (International Herald Tribune, July 21, 2008)

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