ARABIA IN YEATS' POETRY

Pre-Raphaelite Style of the 1890s. However, the source of
inspiration changed later, as F. F. Farag remarks.
There is no doubt that the style and the subject matter of
his early poems reveal a heterogeneous effort in the
direction of the aesthetes whom his father taught him to
admire. However, we cannot dispose of the whole period in
this sweeping fashion. Although the Pre-Raphaelite diction of
his poetry remained throughout this phase. Yeats's .inspiration
after 1885 came from a different quarter. With the
appearance of the Indian Missionary, Mohini Chatte ji on the
scene, a new note entered Yeats's poetry.=
Yeats was stimulated by the East, especially, by India and
Arabia. The interest in India was not with the '~ndia of politicians
or historians or travellers, but an India of pure romance which
bears some subtle yet obvious relation to old romantic Ireland:!
Similarly the interest in Arabia, too, related to an Arabia of 'pure
romance' like the old romantic Ireland:
1 do not wish to overestimate the importance of Arabia and
the Arabs in the study of Yeats, but his interest in them in
fact stands on the same level as his interest in Indian
philose, Japanese drama, occult practices, magic and the
theo~ophy.~
W. B. Yeats attempted to establish a relationship between
~urope and Asia by bringing to light those elements which are
reconcilable. He dreamed of sowing oriental thought in the west.
In fact several artists and men of letters shared Yeats9 preoccupa-
tion with Orient. Laurence Binyon studied Japanese and Chinese
painting, Florence Farr and Sturge Moore studied Buddhism, Ezra
Pound and Arthur WaIey translated Japanese and Chinese works. In
America Emerson and Whitman turned to the East. T.S. Eliot applied
himself to Sanskrit. Max Muller was publishing translations of the
literature of the East. Once, in a letter to his friend Ethel Mannin,
Yeats wrote:
Our tradition only permit us to bless, for the arts are an
extention of the beautitudes. Blessed be heroic death
(Shakespeare's tragedies), blessed be heroic life (Cervantes),
blessed be the wise (Balzac). Then there is a still more
convincing reason why we'should not admit ppaganda into
our lives. I shall write out the style of The Ambian Nights
(which I am reading daily).'
From 1912 to 1915 yeats was , influenced by Rabindranath
Tagore, in whose work, he observed. a supreme culture full of
purity and passion. This made Yeats re-examine the nature of his
vork and he 'kept an eye cocked for other Eastern sages.*a Yeats,
thus stated in a letter to Olivia Shakespeare: