Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures and Table
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 “Something Intended, Complete”: Major Work on Yeats Past, Present, and Yet to Come
- 2 Ghost, Medium, Criminal, Genius: Lombrosian Types in Yeats's Art and Philosophy
- 3 “Born Anew”: W. B. Yeats's “Eastern” Turn in the 1930s
- 4 W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead
- 5 Yeats, the Great Year, and Pierre Duhem
- 6 The Morphological Interaction of the Four Faculties in the Historical System of W. B. Yeats's A Vision
- 7 Yeats and Abstraction: From Berkeley to Zen
- I Annotations in the Writings of Walter Savage Landor in the Yeatses' Library
- II Yeats's Notes on Leo Frobenius's The Voice of Africa (1913)
- Index
3 - “Born Anew”: W. B. Yeats's “Eastern” Turn in the 1930s
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures and Table
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 “Something Intended, Complete”: Major Work on Yeats Past, Present, and Yet to Come
- 2 Ghost, Medium, Criminal, Genius: Lombrosian Types in Yeats's Art and Philosophy
- 3 “Born Anew”: W. B. Yeats's “Eastern” Turn in the 1930s
- 4 W. B. Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead
- 5 Yeats, the Great Year, and Pierre Duhem
- 6 The Morphological Interaction of the Four Faculties in the Historical System of W. B. Yeats's A Vision
- 7 Yeats and Abstraction: From Berkeley to Zen
- I Annotations in the Writings of Walter Savage Landor in the Yeatses' Library
- II Yeats's Notes on Leo Frobenius's The Voice of Africa (1913)
- Index
Summary
Critical responses to Yeats's engagement with Asian literature and thought have tended to veer between opposite extremes. Skeptics have sought to ridicule what they have interpreted as a superficial flirtation with, or expression of, merely questionable “New Age” tendencies in the Irish poet. Enthusiasts, on the other hand, have been quick to embrace the wisdom and universality of Yeats's attempts to transcend, or question, the limitations of Western civilization, often emphasizing the exclusively Eastern provenance of key Yeatsian themes. Shiro Naito, for instance, has tried to show that “the later Yeats found the ideas of tragic gaiety and Unity of Being in the East.” More modestly, Jerusha McCormack has claimed that Yeats, in the final stanza of “Lapis Lazuli,” is able to transcend his Western conditioning and attain a vision that is fully Daoist. Other commentators have been less generous, essentially repeating Auden's censure of the “Southern Californian” side of Yeats. One aspect of what is at stake is the link between Yeats's beliefs and his works of literature. While he is widely acknowledged as a key literary figure of the twentieth century, with few rivals within English–language poetry, Yeats's beliefs have tended to be mocked, avoided, or—more insidiously perhaps—tacitly altered through being rephrased. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with his esoteric ideas, it is hard to argue that the elaborate belief–system propounded in A Vision, for instance, is at all close to the mainstream of modern secularism. Margaret Mills Harper has pointed to the resulting lack of fit between an appreciation of Yeats's verse and his thought. In the context of her own work on Yeats's esoteric pursuits and automatic writing, she criticizes what she calls:
a lingering misrepresentation of the general observation that his faith strengthens his verse, particularly those aspects of his faith that show him consorting him with the lower classes, taking wisdom from his wife, or toying with the exotic East. Luckily, the story goes, his passions for hermetic magic, spiritualism, and even the automatic experiments, not to mention his connections with Indian philosophy, including Tantrism, in the 1930s, were one by one transmuted into the more artistically promising region of “metaphor.” In other words, he could use his religious convictions for his art.
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- Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult , pp. 83 - 106Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016