Yeats and Asia: Overviews and case studies

By Cork University Press

The association of Yeats with Asia suggests references to Byzantium, Theosophy, the influence of Mohini Chatterjee, Occultism, Rabindranath Tagore or the Upanishads, Nōh theatre, masks or his fugitive use of Zen koans, and the gyres as a version of Yin and Yang. Yeats made explicit references to Asian matters in his works, like the Buddha in ‘The Statues,’ as well as implicit references that might be evident to Asian readers but otherwise opaque, like the ‘polished mirror’ in Per Amica Silentia Lunae. There is also the vexed and vexing question of ‘Asia’ itself’. For the ancient Greeks it was the far shore of the Aegean Sea, the opposite and ‘Other’ of their own ‘Europe,’ long before Edward Said called attention to the implications and consequences of ‘Orientalism’. Many experts doubt that Yeats ‘correctly’ understood the Asian cultural references that he cherry-picked for his own purposes. Others doubt that it really mattered, since he turned everything he touched to his own idiosyncratic use anyway. These essays revisit the roles of West, South and East Asia in his work and revise the theoretical bases that have been applied to his use of Asia in the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cork University Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781782053996

Book preview

YEATS

AND ASIA

OVERVIEWS AND CASE STUDIES

YEATS

AND ASIA

OVERVIEWS AND CASE STUDIES

Edited by

Seán Golden

First published in 2020 by

Cork University Press

Boole Library

University College Cork

Cork T12 ND89

Ireland

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934707

Distribution in the USA Longleaf Services, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

Copyright:

© text: the authors ©

images: the named owners

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or otherwise, without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying in Ireland issued by the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 25 Denzille Lane, Dublin 2.

The rights of the authors have been asserted by them in accordance with Copyright and Related Rights Acts 2000 to 2007.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78205-397-2

Printed in Poland by BZ Graf

Design and typesetting by Alison Burns at Studio 10 Design, Cork

Cover image: Kate Mac Donagh, ‘Blind Man’ mixed media courtesy of the artist.

in memoriam

Dermot Healy

1947–2014

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Permissions

Introduction

SEÁN GOLDEN

PART I: YEATS AND ASIA

Yeats’ Asias: Modernism, Orientalism, Anti-Orientalism

JAHAN RAMAZANI

Traces of Ancient Things: W.B. Yeats and Sato’s Sword

JOSEPH LENNON

Theosophical Mediations in Yeats’ Occult Encounters

GAURI VISWANATHAN

Rabindranath Tagore’s Reception of W.B. Yeats

SIRSHENDU MAJUMDAR

The Hare-Dancer upon the Mountaintop: An Embodiment of Yeats’ Mandala Metaphysics

MARIA KAMPYLI

A Matter of Life and Death: Zen Buddhism and W.B. Yeats’ Final Decade

DAVID O’GRADY

W.B. Yeats, Ernest Fenollosa and Lafcadio Hearn: Triptych or Bridge between Japan and the West

AKIKO MANABE

The Ghost of Fenollosa in the Wings of the Abbey Theatre

SEÁN GOLDEN

Fenollosa’s Manuscript of Kikazu Zato: The Japanese Source of Yeats’ The Cat and the Moon

YOKO SATO

A Kyogen Version of Yeats’ ‘Kiogen’: On Directing The Cat and the Moon in Japan

KAORU MATSUMOTO

PART II: YEATS ON ASIA

SEÁN GOLDEN

Preamble

South Asian Buddhism and Theosophy

Japonisme and Cathay

East Asian Art

Nōh Theatre

West Asia and ‘Byzantium’

Zen Buddhism

Upanishads, Yoga and Tantra

Trance, Dance, Blessedness and Joy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

SEÁN GOLDEN, now retired, was Full Professor and Director of the East Asian Studies & Research Centre of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He lived and worked some years in China. Before China, he specialised in Irish Studies and James Joyce, after, in cross-cultural studies, the social history of translation, as well as Chinese thought, politics and international relations, with numerous publications in English, Spanish and Catalan on these topics. Co-editor with Peter Fallon of Soft Day: A Miscellany of Contemporary Irish Literature (1980), in Ireland he has published prose and poetry in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Cyphers, The Crane Bag, Force 10, The SHOp, The Stinging Fly, The Cathach and North West Words. Recent publications include ‘W.B. Yeats: From Sligo to Nōh via Ernest Fenollosa’, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings (2016); ‘The small stone that no one sees gives all the balance: Unique Perspective and Personal Idiom in the Works of Dermot Healy’, in Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy (2016); ‘Commemorating the Anonymous: British Imperialist Discourse in China and Its Backlash among the Irish’, Irish Journal of Asian Studies (2016).

MARIA KAMPYLI graduated from the Department of English Language and Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2001. In 2003 she acquired a literary translation diploma from the European Centre for the Translation of Literature and the Human Sciences. She received her PhD degree from University College Dublin in 2015. The title of her thesis is ‘Towards Zero Metaphysics: Eastern Mysticism and the Unfolding of the City, Dancer and Mountain Mandalas in Later Yeats’.

JOSEPH LENNON is the Emily C. Riley Director of the Center for Irish Studies and Associate Dean of International and Interdisciplinary Initiatives at Villanova University. His book Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (2004) won the Donald Murphy Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies. He has published articles on literature and cultural history in journals such as Irish University Review, New Hibernia Review, Women ’s Studies, The European Legacy and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as chapters in books on British, Irish and Indian literature and culture. Irish publisher Salmon Poetry published his volume Fell Hunger in 2011, and he has published poems in journals such as The Denver Quarterly, Natural Bridge, Midwest Quarterly and Poetry Ireland. His current book project focuses on the beginnings of the modern hunger strike in the early twentieth century in England, Ireland and India.

SIRSHENDU MAJUMDAR holds a PhD from Jadavpur University where he also took his MA and MPhil degrees. He is Associate Professor of English at Bolpur College (affiliated to The University of Burdwan) and is the author of Yeats and Tagore: A Comparative Study of Cross-Cultural Poetry, Nationalist Politics, Hyphenated Margins and the Ascendancy of the Mind (2013). He has collaborated on translation of literary texts and contributes to academic journals and the popular press.

AKIKO MANABE is Professor of English, Shiga University, Japan. She specialises in American as well as Irish Modernist poetry and drama, especially Ezra Pound and other poets he directly influenced such as W.B. Yeats and Ernest Hemingway with a special interest in the relationship of words and music. She has recently carried out research on the Japanese influence on European and American Modernism, especially in relation to Nōh and kyogen. Recent publications include Hemingway and Ezra Pound in Venezia (2015) and ‘Pound, Yeats and Hemingway’s Encounter with Japan: Kyogen and Hemingway’s Poetry’ in Japanese Artists and Modernism in Europe and America (2016).

KAORU MATSUMOTO studied with the 12th Shigeyama Sengoro Family, one of the most prestigious kyogen families in Japan having performed professionally for almost 600 years. Located in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto, they have toured throughout Japan as well as internationally. He debuted on stage at twenty-three years of age, as ado, secondary actor in the play Uri Nusubito (The Melons Thief). In 1984, he founded the Kyogen Research Group, with Masami Amitani and Yasushi Maruishi. In 2006, he was decorated with an award by the government of Kyoto.

DAVID O’GRADY is an independent researcher. His essay ‘Yeats and Zen and a Horseman Passing By’ was published in New Hibernia Review, Autumn 2016.

R. JAHAN RAMAZANI is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of five books: Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres (2013); A Transnational Poetics (2009), winner of the 2011 Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, awarded for the best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010; The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001); Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990). He is a co-editor of the most recent editions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012), and an associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA and the Thomas Jefferson Award, the University of Virginia’s highest honour.

YOKO SATO is Professor Emerita at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. Her main research interest focuses upon the poetry and drama of W.B. Yeats. She is co-translator of Morton Cohen’s Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1999) and Seamus Heaney’s The Place of Writing (2001) and is currently working on translating Ann Saddlemyer’s Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats.

GAURI VISWANATHAN is Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has published widely on education, religion and culture; nineteenth-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of modern disciplines. She is the author of Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (2014) and Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998), which won the Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association, the James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association of America and the Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. She also edited Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said (2001). She is co-editor of the prize-winning book series South Asia across the Disciplines, published jointly by the university presses of Columbia, Chicago and California under a Mellon grant. She has held numerous visiting chairs, among them the Beckman Professorship at Berkeley, and was recently an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and a Visiting Mellon Scholar at the University of Cape Town. She has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities and Mellon fellowships, and was a fellow at various international research institutes. She has published extensively on the cultural influence of Theosophy and her current work is on genealogies of secularism and the writing of alternative religious histories via Theosophy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My earlier professional career involved research and teaching in the fields of Irish literary studies. I was also closely involved with the Irish literary and artistic scene, in particular, with my lifelong friend, Dermot Healy. In the early 1980s I was hired by a Chinese university to teach literature. The experience of living and working some years in China led me to study the language, literature and thought of China and to a subsequent career in East Asian Studies. In China I also became involved with the literary and artistic scene, especially the group of poets known as the 朦胧诗人 Ménglóng Shīrén or ‘Misty Poets’ and the 星星 Xīngxīng or ‘Stars’ group of artists. Because I was working in Spain I began to publish mostly in Spanish and Catalan, and almost entirely in the field of East Asian Studies, but I continued to spend part of each year at my home in north Sligo in Ireland and I continued to be involved with Irish writers and artists. At an East Asian Studies symposium that we organised in Barcelona in 2009, Haun Saussy gave me a copy of the critical edition of Ernest Fenollosa’s manuscripts for what Ezra Pound turned into The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry that Saussy had co-edited with Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein. I had always approached Fenollosa’s work from the standpoint of literary history and through Pound’s perspective. I now discovered that Pound had left out much of what Fenollosa had written, and that the unpublished material was in many ways as or more interesting than the material Pound had found worthwhile. I also discovered that my own immersion in East Asian thought for three decades had brought me much closer to Fenollosa’s own experience of East Asia and that I now understood the cultural references in Fenollosa’s work much better, having followed a similar learning curve. This renewed my interest in the period in which W.B. Yeats worked with Pound on the Fenollosa manuscripts and I began to notice many more Asian references and influences, implicit as well as explicit, in the whole body of Yeats’ work. Pound favoured Confucianism to the detriment of Buddhism, Daoism and correlative thought, but it was precisely these schools of thought that interested Yeats. My own immersion in Daoism, Buddhism and correlative thought now complemented my knowledge of Irish literature and provided me with the possibility of integrating the two halves of my professional career. Thus was born the project of ‘Yeats and Asia’ and my return to Irish studies through publications on this topic in English and through participation in conferences and symposia, where I met more scholars who shared a similar interest.

I would like to begin by acknowledging the help and advice of Caitríona Yeats as this project developed, as well as the contributors to this volume, Maria Kampyli, Joseph Lennon, Sirshendu Majumdar, Akiko Manabe, Kaoru Matsumoto, David O’Grady, Jahan Ramazani, Yoko Sato and Gauri Viswanathan. The International Yeats Society (http://www.internationalyeatssociety.org) created by Margaret Mills Harper, Alexandra Poulain, Geraldine Higgins and Hedwig Schwall to promote greater communication and co-operation among Yeats scholars has provided a platform for exploring W.B. Yeats and Asia through conferences and symposia, supported by the International Yeats Society Board: Lauren Arrington, Warwick Gould, Marjorie Howes, Youngmin Kim, James Pethica, Yoko Sato, Hedwig Schwall and Joseph Valente. Kezia Whiting has been especially helpful with organisational matters involving the International Yeats Society and its website. The Yeats and Asia project has also benefited from the generosity and advice of a community of scholars, including Charles Armstrong, Zsuzanna Balazs, Matthew Campbell, Wayne K. Chapman, Shirley Chew, Yoko Chiba, Elena Cotta Ramusino, Seamus Deane, David Ewick, Roy Foster, Adrian Frazier, Luke Gibbons, Matthew Gibson, Derek Hand, Keith Hopper, Yuko Ito, Richard Kearney, John Kelly, Declan Kiberd, Youngmin Kim, David Lloyd, Pierre Longuenesse, Jerusha McCormack, Neil Mann, Christopher Morash, Neil Murphy, Adrian Paterson, Wit Pietrzak, Thierry Robin, Barry Sheils, Ronald Schuchard, Masaru Sekine, Tom Walker, Shotaro Yamauchi and Melinda Szuts. Haun Saussy, Zhaoming Qian, Jonathan Stalling and Lucas Klein contributed to research on Ernest Fenollosa; Bernard R. Faure, Judith Snodgrass and Wayne Yokoyama to research on D.T. Suzuki; David Soud to research on Tantrism; Melinda Boyd Parsons and Stuart R. Kaplan to research on Pamela Colman ‘Pixie’ Smith.

Many activities associated with this project have been carried out in association with the Yeats Society Sligo (https://www.yeatssociety.com/), for which I would like to acknowledge the Director, Susan O’Keeffe, and the Board: Chris Gonley (Chair), Lorraine McDonnell (Secretary), Ciarán Byrne, Nuala Clarke, Malcolm Hamilton, Brendan McCormack, John Nugent and Tara Rodgers. Many veteran members of the Yeats Society have also been helpful over the years, especially Martin Enright, Maura and Michael McTighe, Damien Brennan, Siobhan Dooney, Terence Herron, John Kavanagh, Ian Kennedy, Eilo Molloy and Paul Murray.

Kate MacDonagh has participated in many of the events associated with this project and she kindly gave us permission to use her mixed media ‘Blind Man’ for the cover of this book.

Yeats and Asia has received funding from a number of research projects: Asia Oriental: Paradigmas emergentes, política(s), dinámicas socioculturales y sus consecuencias (FFI2015–70513–P) – Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain); InterÀsia i el nou sistema internacional: Societat, política i cultura (SGR 1402 GRC) – Departament d’Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació, Generalitat de Catalunya; El Impacto de Asia Oriental en el Contexto Español: Producción cultural, política(s) y sociedad (FFI2011–29090) – Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain); Inter-Asia, Grup de recerca interdisciplinari d’Estudis d’Àsia Oriental (2009SGR1103) – Departament d’Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informació, Generalitat de Catalunya; Procesos Interculturales de Asia Oriental en la Sociedad Internacional de la Información: Ciudadanía, género y producción cultural. INTERASIA (FFI2008–05911) – Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain); Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Research Number: 23520286 (Japan); JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP12345678 (Japan); Japan for Sligo via Yeats & Fenollosa: Common Traditions, Mutual Innovations (27RE392), Japan Foundation; as well as financial support from the East Asian Studies and Research Centre (Centre d’Estudis i Recerca sobre Àsia Oriental – CERAO) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona for the documentary Things upon the Stone that recorded the rehearsal process of Blue Raincoat Theatre Company’s 2016 production of The Cat and the Moon, and for this volume.

Participation in a number of conferences has made it possible to present preliminary versions of some of the material in Yeats and Asia and to identify and cooperate with a number of scholars with similar interests. The College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore organised Imagining Asia from 16–18 January 2015 (https://cohass.ntu.edu.sg/NewsnEvents/Events/Pages/Imagining-Asia-a-Symposium-(16–to-18–January-2015).aspx). I would like to acknowledge the generosity and help of Neil Murphy, Shirley Chew, Seeto Wei Peng, Richard Alan Barlow and Samuel Wee Ting Han for this event.

The inaugural Conference of the International Yeats Society, A Writer Young and Old: Yeats at 150, was held at the University of Limerick from 15–18 October 2015, organised by the School of Culture and Communication (http://www.internationalyeatssociety.org/conference). It included a number of communications on Yeats and Asia. Meg Harper, Dana Garvin and Kezia Whiting were particularly helpful. There it was decided to organise a symposium on the subject of Yeats and Asia in Barcelona the following year.

With the support of the Japan Foundation and the Embassy of Japan in Ireland, and in collaboration with Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, The Model, the Centre for East Asian Studies & Research of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Yeats Society Sligo and Sligo Institute of Technology, and on behalf of the Yeats Foundation of Sligo, we organised Japan for Sligo via Yeats & Fenollosa: Common Traditions, Mutual Innovations from 10–13 November 2015, a four-day festival dedicated to the influence of Japan on W.B. Yeats and on Sligo, past and future. Yamada Yuichi and Jenny O’Connor from the Embassy of Japan in Dublin, Ayo Hino of the Japan Foundation, Liam Scollan, Tom Daly and Martin Reilly of the Yeats Foundation, Megan Johnston, Emer McGarry, Marie Louise Blaney and Tara McGowan of The Model, Vincent Cunnane of Sligo Institute of Technology and Niall Henry of the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, together with the East Asian Studies and Research Centre of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona all provided support. The composer Trevor Knight, the artist Alice Maher and the butoh dancer Gyohei Zaitsu created a performance entitled A Skein Unwound for this symposium, and the Yeats scholar and hereditary Nōh theatre director Masaru Sekine presented his opera Hone-no-Yume, based on Yeats’ play The Dreaming of the Bones.

On behalf of the International Yeats Society, the East Asian Studies & Research Centre of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona organised Yeats & Asia: Imagining Asia through Yeats, Imagining Yeats through Asia from 15–17 December 2016 in Barcelona (http://www.internationalyeatssociety.org/Barcelona%20symposium). Youngmin Kim, Joseph Lennon, Akiko Manabe, Anupama Mohan, Alexandra Poulain, Yoko Sato, Malcolm Sen and Sanghita Sen formed the Scientific Committee, with help from Marjorie Howes and Warwick Gould. Joseph Lennon, Akiko Manabe, Carrie J. Preston, Jahan Ramazani and Gauri Viswanathan were keynote speakers. Kaoru Matsumoto gave a kyogen workshop. Niall Henry premiered the documentary Things upon the Stone dedicated to the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company’s production of Yeats’ play The Cat and the Moon, together with Bettina Seitz and Peter Martin. Artwork was provided by Kate MacDonagh (Mask) and Yoko Akino (The Cat and the Moon). Irene Masdeu, Eamon Butterfield and Silvia Vásquez were invaluable for the organisation of the symposium.

The 2018 International Yeats Society Symposium and the 54th Annual Conference of the Yeats Society of Japan held from 15–16 December 2018 in Kyoto provided another opportunity for exploring aspects of Yeats and Asia and for meeting with Asian Yeats scholars (http://www.internationalyeatssociety.org/content/2018–kyoto-symposium). Hiroko Ikeda, Akiko Manabe, Mariko Nishitani, Ryoji Okuda, Yoko Sato, Tomoaki Suwa and Fuyuji Tanigawa were very helpful.

The UGC-SAP (DRS-I), Centre for English Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and the University of Limerick, in association with the Embassy of Ireland in India, organised an International Conference on Yeats and India on 21–22 February 2019 in New Delhi (https://ps-af.facebook.com/events/jawaharlal-nehru-university-delhi/yeats-and-india-international-conference/1007810286088071). Especially helpful were Dhananjay Singh, Meg Harper, Pawan Kumar, Komal Agarwal, Ashim Dutta, Sirshendu Majumdar, David Soud and Ben Levitas. The Embassy of Ireland in India provided a travel grant and His Excellency Mr Brian McElduff, Irish Ambassador to India, Peter McIvor and Máirtín Cronin were gracious hosts. Kapil Kapoor, Makarand R. Paranjape and Ritika Ji facilitated participation in a seminar on Yeats and India at the Indian Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) in Shimla on 25 February 2019.

Libraries are an essential source for research. I would like to thank the Keeper of the Manuscript Room of the National Library of Ireland for granting access to the Yeats Collection and in particular to books from Yeats’ personal library. Of the Manuscript Room staff, James Harte, Tom Desmond, Elizabeth Harford, Avice-Claire McGovern and Nora Moroney provided help and counsel. Sophie Evans helped at the Royal Irish Academy. Rebecca Aldi, June Can and Sara Powell of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University helped locate Ernest Fenollosa material among the Ezra Pound Papers there. Lleontina Díaz of the Biblioteca d’Humanitats, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona helped obtain valuable resources.

With regard to this project, special mention must be made of my colleagues at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Joaquín Beltrán, Irene Masdeu, Marisa Presas, Joaquim Sala Sanahuja, Laura Vea Rodríguez and Minkang Zhou, for sustained support over the years.

Both the aesthetics and the poetics of Yeats’ work in theatre were profoundly influenced by his interest in Nōh, kyogen and Zen Buddhism. The Blue Raincoat Theatre Company in Sligo, founded by Niall Henry and Malcolm Hamilton in 1991, has specialised in the production of plays by Yeats. In 2016, their innovative version of The Cat and the Moon provided an opportunity to observe how Yeats’ Asian influences could be interpreted. The East Asian Studies and Research Centre of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona commissioned a documentary entitled Things upon the Stone, filmed by Peter Martin, to record the rehearsal process. Collaboration with Blue Raincoat has been crucial to the development of this project, with special thanks to John Carty, Brian F. Devaney, Niall Henry, Joe Hunt, Ciaran McAuley, Paul McDonnell, Fiona McGeown, Barry McKinney, Sandra O’Malley, Peter Martin and Bettina Seitz. Carrie J. Preston and Yoko Sato also contributed to the design of the documentary.

At the same time, Akiko Manabe began collaborating with Kaoru Matsu-moto and the Shigeyama Sengoro family of Kyoto who prepared a traditional kyogen-style version of Yeats’ The Cat and the Moon. Shigeyama Sengoro are one of the most prestigious kyogen families in Japan. In July 2017 both Blue Raincoat’s and Shigeyama Sengoro’s versions of the play were performed in Sligo. Matsumoto-san’s version was also performed as part of the 2018 International Yeats Society Symposium in Kyoto.

Observing the embodiment of Yeats’ multimedia approach to theatre added incalculably to our understanding and appreciation of the East Asian influences in his work. Yeats’ poetry has long been a staple of the academic approach to his work, perhaps to the detriment of his prose and his theatre. Since 1959, the Yeats Society Sligo has organised a summer school dedicated to Yeats’ work, a pioneering and enduring endeavour. Parallel events have evolved in Sligo, among them the Tread Softly festival organised by Michael Carty and Niall Henry, Blue Raincoat’s A Country Under Wave and Martina Gillan’s Lily Lolly Craft Fest and annual Yeats-themed art exhibitions at the Hamilton Gallery, all of which offer opportunities to bring Yeats into the wider community and to experiment with the performance of Yeats’ work. In 2015, then Senator Susan O’Keeffe spearheaded the worldwide celebration of the 150th anniversary of Yeats’ birth and inaugurated the annual celebration ofYeats Day (13 June). This marked a watershed in the resuscitation of a general interest in Yeats beyond academe. Prior to that, for many people in Sligo and in Ireland, Yeats was something to be got through on the Leaving Certificate. Occasionally someone would recite ‘A Stolen Child’ or sing ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’. As a result of the variety of public performances of his work, many people were pleasantly surprised to discover he could be interesting, even entertaining.

This element of performance has been very influential in the development of the Yeats and Asia project. On the first weekend of August 2015, as part of their programme of activities entitled A Country Under Wave, Blue Raincoat organised rehearsed readings of all twenty-six of Yeats’ plays by local people, in situ in a variety of locations in and around Sligo. Blue Raincoat also took the performance of Yeats’ plays out into the landscape; community involvement became an essential element of the reception of Yeats’ work as a result. It also became evident that there is much still to be discovered in Yeats’ work, in particular in his theatre work. Samuel Beckett recognised the possibilities for the stage in Yeats’ theatrical experiments, in the theatricality of his plays more than in the text, but the full potential of Yeats’ theatre may yet to be discovered. Throughout the development of this project I have benefited from the company and collaboration of careful readers and friends in Sligo, including, among writers, the late Dermot Healy and the late Leland Bardwell, as well as Mary Branley, Peter Fallon, Malcolm Hamilton, Brian Leyden, Eoin McNamee, Paul Muldoon and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin; among artists, the late Sean McSweeney, John Behan, Diarmuid Delargy, Kate MacDonagh, Martina Gillan, Cormac O’Leary, Caitríona O’Leary, Alice Maher and Dermot Seymour; among supporters in performances, Jeremy Byrd, Oona Doherty, Moninne Fitzpatrick, Ferdia Gallagher, Laoise Gallagher, Helen Gillard, Leo Leydon, Des McFadden, Eamon McGauran, Niamh McGauran, Dave McLoughlin, Padraig McLoughlin, Orna McSweeney, Brendan Marren, Bernie Marron, Padraig Meehan, the late Peter Milne, Michael Neary, Mícheál Ó Cearbhalláin and Margaret Richardson.

Several people have helped me to navigate the intricacies of copyright discoveries and permissions, beginning with Caitríona Yeats and including Fatima Amin for AP Watt at United Agents; Sara Martínez for Springer Nature/Macmillan; Yessenia Santos for Simon & Schuster/Scribner; John Kelly and Ben Kennedy for Oxford University Press; Christopher Wait for New Directions; Desmond Biddulph, Jonathan Earl and Wayne Yokohama for The Buddhist Society; as well as Mel Boyd, June Can, Fiona Dunne, David Ewick, Ruth Hallinan, Eleanor Holcombe, Simran Kaur, Brian Keeble, Shiro Naito, Jane O’Halloran, Justin Robinson and Anthony Taylor.

At Cork University Press I would especially like to acknowledge the help and support of Maria O’Donovan, Mike Collins, Aonghus Meaney, Alison Burns, Lisa Scholey, Maureen Fitzgerald, Agnes Nagle and the anonymous external readers.

PERMISSIONS

The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following permissions granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

Extracts from W.B. Yeats: ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, ‘A Model for the Laureate’, ‘All Souls’ Night’, ‘Among School Children’, ‘Byzantium’, ‘His Bargain’, ‘Imitated from the Japanese’, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, ‘Meru’, ‘Mohini Chatterjee’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Symbols’, ‘The Friends of His Youth’, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, ‘The Gyres’, ‘The Man and the Echo’, ‘The Pilgrim’, ‘The Spur’, ‘The Statues’, ‘Vacillation’ from The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (1957), by AP Watt at United Agents on behalf of Caitríona Yeats; from NLI MS 30,527, MS of ‘Certain Noble Plays of Japan’, ‘Occult Notes and Diaries’, quoted in W.B. Yeats and Occultism: A Study of His Works in Relation to Indian Lore, the Cabbala, Swedenborg, Boehme and Theosophy (1974), NLI MS 30,537, ‘Memoirs’, published in W.B. Yeats, Memoirs [of] W.B. Yeats: Autobiography [and] First Draft Journal, ed. Denis Donoghue (1973), BBC radio script (quoted in Jonathan Stallworthy, Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), by United Agents LLP on behalf of Caitríona Yeats; NLI MS 30,749 ‘Under Ben Bulben’ drafts, F.3v; quoted in Jon Stallworthy (ed.), Yeats: Last Poems (1968), reproduced with permission of Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH (‘SNCSC’); NLI MS 13,593 ‘The Statues’ drafts, F.3v; quoted in Jon Stallworthy, ‘Long-Legged Fly and The Statues’, in Vision and Revision in Yeats’s Last Poems (1969), by permission of Oxford University Press; Robartes MS from A Vision, 1925, and ‘Michael Robartes Foretells’, NLI MS 36,272/33, folio 2, quoted in Wayne K. Chapman (ed.), W.B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings. Featuring the Making of His ‘Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends’ (2018), Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc; W.B. Yeats quoted in Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats, 1865–1939 (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1989), reproduced with permission of Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH (‘SNCSC’); ‘A General Introduction for My Work’, in Essays and Introductions (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1961), ‘AE’, in William H. O’Donnell (ed.), Prefaces and Introductions: Uncollected Prefaces and Introductions by Yeats to Works by Other Authors and to Anthologies Edited by Yeats, vol. 6 in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989), Autobiographies (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1955), ‘J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time’, Essays and Introductions (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1961) and ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’, Essays and Introductions (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1961), reproduced with permission of Springer Nature Customer Service Center GmbH (‘SNCSC’); The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, vol. 2: 1896–1900, John Kelly, Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats (electronic edition), Vol. 3 (1901–1904), ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press through PLSclear; The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats (electronic edition), Unpublished Letters (1905–1939), ed. John Kelly (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, 2002), by permission of Oxford University Press; The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. II: The Plays by W.B. Yeats, edited by David R. Clark and Ronald E. Clark, copyright 2001 by Anne Yeats. Notes and preparatory material, copyright 2001 by David R. Clark and Ronald E. Clark. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved; The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. III: Autobiographies by W.B. Yeats, edited by William H. O’Donnell et al., copyright 1916, 1936 by The Macmillan Company, Inc., copyright renewed 1944, 1964 by Anne Yeats. Preface, introduction, notes and compilation copyright 1999 by William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved; The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. V: Later Essays by W.B. Yeats, edited by William H. O’Donnell, copyright 1994 by Michael Yeats. Editorial matter copyright 1994 by William H. O’Donnell. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved; The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. X: Later Articles and Reviews by W.B. Yeats, edited by Colton Johnson, copyright 2000 by Anne and Michael Yeats. Editorial matter copyright 2000 by Colton Johnson. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved; The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. XIII & XIV: A Vision, Original and Revised by W.B. Yeats, edited by Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper, Original: copyright 1925 by William Butler Yeats, copyright renewed. Supplementary materials copyright 2008 by Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills Harper. The Revised: copyright 1937 by W.B. Yeats, copyright renewed 1965 by Bertha Georgie Yeats and Anne Butler Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Extracts from: Jack B. Yeats, The Only Art of Jack B. Yeats: Letters & Essays, ed. Declan Foley (2009), by Lilliput Press; Susan Mary Yeats, letter to John Butler Yeats in 1910, NLI MS 31,112 quoted by Gifford Lewis, The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala (1994) by Irish Academic Press; Elizabeth Corbet Yeats, ‘Why Brushwork Should Be Included in All Kindergarten Time-Tables’, reprinted in Gifford Lewis, The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala (1994), by Irish Academic Press.

Extracts from: Rowman & Littlefield for copyright 1985 Brian Arkins, Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats; Susan Bazargan, ‘W.B. Yeats: Autobiography and Colonialism’, Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, vol. 13, 1995, pp. 209–10, by Michigan Publishing – University of Michigan Press; Matthew Campbell, ‘Recovering Ancient Ireland’, in Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012) by Oxford University Press through PLSclear; Columbia University Press for copyright 2016 Partha Chatterjee, Empire and Nation: Selected Essays; Springer Nature BV through PLSclear for copyright 1986 ‘Ezra Pound’s Versions of Fenollosa’s Noh Manuscripts and Yeats’s Unpublished Suggestions & Corrections’ by Yoko Chiba in Yeats Annual, no. 4; Edward Gordon Craig, ‘The Art of the Theatre. The First Dialogue [1905]’, On the Art of the Theatre (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1911), ‘The Actor and the Über-Marionette’, On the Art of the Theatre (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1911), The Theatre – Advancing (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1919), with the consent of the Edward Gordon Craig Estate; ‘Yeats, Ireland and Revolution’, The Crane Bag, vol. 1, no. 2, 1977, and ‘Introduction’, in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward W. Said (eds), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (1990), by Sheil Land Associates Ltd on behalf of Seamus Deane; The New York Review of Books, copyright 1985 Richard Ellmann, ‘Yeats’s Second Puberty’; David Ewick for copyright 2003 ‘Orientalism, Absence, and Quick-Firing Guns: The Emergence of Japan as a Western Text’, Japonisme, Orientalism, Modernism: A Critical Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse; R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life. Volume I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (1998), W.B. Yeats: A Life. Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939 (2003) and Words Alone: Yeats & His Inheritances (2011), by Oxford University Press through PLSclear; Penguin Random House for copyright 1980 Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings and Other Interviews; SUNY Press for copyright 2015 Talking to Gods: Occultism in the Work of W.B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune by Susan Johnston Graf; Studies in the Literary Imagination for copyright 1981 ‘Unbelievers in the House: Yeats’s Automatic Script’ by George Harper Mills; Princeton University Press for copyright 2012 ‘Waka’ by Gustav Heldt in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics; Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd published by Vintage, reproduced by permission of the author and The Random House Group Ltd, copyright 1996; We Have Never Been Modern by Bruno Latour, translated by Catharine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, copyright 1993 by Harvester Wheatsheaf and the President and Fellows of Harvard College; Cork University Press for copyright Joep Leerssens, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (1997); Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (2004), by Syracuse University Press; Gifford Lewis, The Yeats Sisters and the Cuala (1994), by Irish Academic Press; David Lloyd, ‘Discussion Outside History: Irish New Histories and the Subalternity Effect’, Subaltern Studies, reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press India, copyright Oxford University Press 1997; Cambridge University Press through PLSclear for copyright 2013 Yeats and Modern Poetry by Edna Longley; Kate MacDonagh, Blind Man, mixed media, courtesy of the artist; University of Hawai’i Press for copyright 1997 ‘Experiments in Kyōgen’, in Nō and Kyōgen in the Contemporary World by Nomura Mansaku; History and Theory through PLSclear for Suzanne L. Marchand, ‘The Rhetoric of Artefacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski’, History and Theory, vol. 33, no. 4, 1994; Joseph Masseck, ‘Introduction’, Composition, copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of California, published by the University of California Press; Princeton University Press for copyright 2000 Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking by Walter D. Mignolo; copyright 2008 from Yeats and Theosophy by Ken Montieth. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc; Shiro Naito, Yeats and Zen: A Study of the Transformation of His Mask (Kyoto: Yamaguchi, 1984), by permission of Shiro Naito; The Eastern Buddhist Society for copyright 1972 ‘Yeats and Zen Buddhism’ by Shiro Naito in The Eastern Buddhist; Santosh Pall, ‘The Dancer in Yeats’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 65, no. 258, Summer 1976; Melinda Boyd Parsons, ‘The Rediscovery of Pamela Colman Smith’ (MA thesis, University of Delaware, 1975); Fenollosa by Ezra Pound, from The Ezra Pound Archive (Beinecke Library, Yale University), copyright 2020 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. (Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University); Guide to Kulchur, copyright 1970 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.; ‘The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance by Li Po’ by Ezra Pound, from Translations, copyright 1963 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.; Pound/The Little Review, copyright 1988 by The Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.; ‘The Teacher’s Mission’ by Ezra Pound, from Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, copyright 1935 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.; ‘Kayoi Komachi’ by Ezra Pound, from The Classic Nōh Theatre of Japan, copyright 1959 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.; Columbia University Press for copyright 2016 Carrie J. Preston, Learning to Kneel: Nōh, Modernism and Journeys in Teaching; Rowman & Littlefield for Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: A Biography (Rowman & Littlefield, 1989), all rights reserved; the Literary Estate of Kathleen Raine for copyright 1986, Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Writings of W.B. Yeats (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990); Raritan: Quarterly Review for Jahan Ramazani, ‘W.B. Yeats: A Postcolonial Poet?’, Raritan: Quarterly Review, vol. 17, no. 3, Winter 1998, pp. 64–89; Philosophy Today for Paul Ricoeur, ‘Narrated Time’, Philosophy Today, vol. 29, no. 4, Winter 1985, pp. 259–72; Penguin Random House for copyright 1978 Edward Said, Orientalism; Knopf/ Penguin Random House for copyright 1993 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism; Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said published by Vintage Digital. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd copyright 2014; University of Minnesota Press for copyright 1988 by Edward W. Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonization’, in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature; Permanent Black for copyright 1973 for The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–08 by Sumit Sarkar; The Journal of Irish Studies for permission to reprint Yoko Sato, ‘Fenollosa’s Manuscript of Kikazu Zato: The Japanese Source of Yeats’ The Cat and the Moon’, Journal of Irish Studies. IASIL Japan, vol. XXX, 2015, pp. 27–38; copyright 2013 Gould et al. (contributors retain copyright of their work). The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. From Open Book Publishers/Creative Commons for ‘The Tower: Yeats’s Anti-Modernist Monument’ by Ronald Schuchard in The Living Stream: Essays on Memory of A. Norman Jeffares; SUNY Press for copyright 1987 Women in World Religions by Ananda Sharma and Katherine K. Young; Oxford University Press through PLSclear for David Soud, Divine Cartographies: God, History, and Poeisis in W.B. Yeats, David Jones, and T.S. Eliot (2016); Edinburgh University Press for copyright 2016 for ‘Ireland and Sapphic Journalism between the Wars: A Case Study of Urania (1916–40)’, in Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918–1939: The Interwar Period by Karen Steele. Reproduced with permission of Edinburgh University Press through PLSclear; McGill–Queen’s University Press for Leon Surette, ‘Introduction’, in The Birth of Modernism, Montreal: MQUP, 1994; The Buddhist Society (London) for D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism: First Series (London: Luzac & Co., 1927), Essays in Zen Buddhism: Third Series (London: Rider & Co., 1953) and Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture (Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Society, 1938); Subramanian Swaminathan for ‘Paintings of Ajanta Caves; 2nd century BC to 6th century AD’; Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Kabi Yeats’ [The Poet Yeats], in Sisir Kumar Das and Sukanta Chaudhuri (eds), Selected Writings on Language and Literature: The Oxford Tagore Translations, reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press India, copyright Oxford University Press 1997; University of Chicago Press for copyright 1986 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig; the Estate of Arthur Waley for A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (London: Constable, 1920) and ‘Zen Buddhism and Its Relation to Art’, An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Painting (London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1923); copyright Katharine Worth, 1978, The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett, published by The Athlone Press, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc and the Estate of Katharine Worth; Shotaro Yamauchi and The Journal of Irish Studies for ‘Yeats and Hojin Yano: Yeats’s Japan, Yano’s Japan’, Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 33, 2018, pp. 105–11.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

INTRODUCTION

SEÁN GOLDEN

FOR SOME PEOPLE the association of W.B. Yeats with ‘Asia’ will suggest references to Moors, Arabs, Babylon, Egypt or Byzantium; for others it will suggest Theosophy, Mohini Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore or Shri Purohit Swami and the Upanishads; still others will think of Nōh theatre, dance and masks, his fugitive use of Zen koans from D.T. Suzuki or the gyres as a version of 陰 Yin and 陽 Yang. Yeats made many explicit references to Asian matters in his works, like the Buddha in ‘The Statues’. He also made many implicit references that might be evident to Asian readers yet otherwise be opaque, like the ‘polished mirror’ in Per Amica Silentia Lunae.

There is of course the vexed and vexing question of ‘Asia’ itself, and what it might mean, if indeed it could ever mean any one thing. As Jahan Ramazani suggests in his chapter in this volume, Yeats’ ‘Asias’ were multiple and diverse. For the ancient Greeks Ἀσία was the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, the opposite and ‘Other’ of their own Εὐρώπη Eurṓpē, long before Edward Said called attention to the implications and consequences of asymmetrical colonial power relations in ‘Orientalism’. Eurocentric discourse continues to speak of the Mid-East and East Asia, if not the Far East, establishing its own vantage point as the defining norm. Some Chinese experts refer to Europe as the Far West. The Americas bordering on the Pacific Ocean must ‘go west’ to get to ‘the East’.

Many experts doubt that Yeats really or ‘correctly’ understood the Asian cultural references or genres that he found inspiring for his work – references and genres that he cherry-picked for his own purposes. Others doubt that it really mattered, since he turned everything he touched to his own idiosyncratic use anyway. Yeats’ work is abundant (14 volumes of Collected Works, the Cornell Yeats editions of manuscripts of plays and poems, more than 8,000 letters in the electronic edition, archival material) and varied (poetry, drama, folklore, fiction, essays, lectures, speeches, memoirs and letters). Yeats’ diverse Asias pervade much of it.

This volume is a collection of invited essays by various authors who update and re-examine the often idiosyncratic uses that Yeats made of what he perceived to be ‘Asian’, and the extent to which Euroamerican readers have appreciated this use. They also consider the uses that Asians have made of Yeats. Each chapter revises and re-evaluates previous historical and critical appreciations of the subject by combining a variety of disciplinary approaches and cultural points of view. The approaches taken to the theme range from the general to the specific and bring new light to bear on Yeats and Asia. They broaden the base of Yeats Studies and bring new fields and experts to bear on Yeats, also contributing to wider fields of study like Modernism, genetic criticism, Orientalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism, cross-cultural transfer, comparative cultural studies and several aspects of various fields of Asian Studies.

The scope of this book is large, including chapters related to ‘West Asia’, ‘South Asia’ and ‘East Asia’ and to a variety of genres. No previous book has taken on so large a scope. This is not meant to imply that ‘Asia’ is a monolithic or homogeneous concept. The tendency to treat Asia in such a way is one of the central tenets of Edward Said’s criticism of ‘Orientalism’. The concept and