A LITERARY WEEKEND COMMEMORATING

THE 50^th ANNIVERSARY OF OLIVER ST. JOHN GOGARTY

AT RENVYLE HOUSE HOTEL

Thursday 8th - Sunday 11th November 2007

http://www.gogartysociety.com

Renvyle House Hotel was the former home of Oliver St. John Gogarty (Buck Mulligan of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”) and has played host to many famous people including Augustus John, Lady Gregory, Churchill and W.B. Yeats. It has been a meeting place for the poets and writers who helped to create the new Irish Free State. It has been and is today, a successful modern hotel, retaining its own unique character and sense of history.

Oliver St. John Gogarty  (August 17, 1878 - September 22, 1957) was an Irish physician and ear surgeon, who was also a poet and writer, one of the most prominent Dublin wits, and for some time a political figure of the Irish Free State. He is perhaps now best known as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce's novel Ulysses.

Born at 5 Rutland (now Parnell) Square in Dublin, Gogarty was a medical student and joker who wrote humorous verse and stories. His verse was admired by W. B. Yeats who included more poems by Gogarty than any other poet in his Oxford Book of English Verse. He had a strained relationship with Joyce that ended when Joyce left Ireland; Gogarty claimed a gun was involved. One of his best known bits of doggerel, The Ballad of Japing Jesus, was quoted in the first chapter of Ulysses as the Ballad of Joking Jesus.

In 1924, Gogarty won the bronze medal at the Olympic Games for his poem Ode to the Tailteann Games.