W.B. Yeats was fascinated throughout his life with art, philosophy, religion, and culture from Asia, including India, Japan, China, the Near East and Arabia. He is also one of the few western writers to have received sustained attention in Asia. Many experts doubt that Yeats correctly understood the Asian references he cherry-picked for his own purposes. Others doubt it really mattered. He turned everything he touched to his own idiosyncratic use anyway.
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 Zen koans and the gyres as a version of Yin and Yang.
The topic is badly overdue for reconsideration that links contemporary western literary research with new findings from Asian scholars. Yeats and Asia provides a comprehensive and convenient synopsis of the history and development of his thought on Asia.
Various authors update and re-examine the Asia that Yeats imagined as well as the Yeats that Asia imagined, revising and re-evaluating previous historical and critical appreciations of the subject and bringing new fields and experts to bear on Yeats and his work. They 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. The collection draws Yeats’ interest in all or various parts of Asia together to allow for fascinating juxtapositions and a clear picture of the sources of his poetry, the global reach of his interests, and his creative process.
The first part of the volume is comprised of three overviews by Jahan Ramazani, Joseph Lennon and Gauri Viswanathan together with six case studies on more specialised matters by Sirshendu Majumdar, Maria Kampyli, Dave O’Grady, Akiko Manabe, Seán Golden and Yoko Sato.
It concludes with an elegant and fascinating flourish, a personal essay by Kaoru Matsumoto, about his traditional Japanese production of Yeats’ The Cat and the Moon. The second part weaves Yeats’ own comments from publications and letters into a compendium of the evolution of his lifelong interest in Asian cultural references.
The style is lively and accessible. The book is innovative in its inclusive approach to Asia by Asian as well as non-Asian authors. No previous book has taken on so large a scope.