Letters

WB Yeats and Taiwan

Poet had many Asian friends

Mon Nov 06 2023 - 00:37

Sir, - Denis Staunton’s report describing WB Yeats’s links to South Korea caught my attention (“How WB Yeats resonated with Korea and established a bond spanning the world”, November 2nd).

In fact, Yeats had many Asian friends, such as Rabindranath Tagore, or the Japanese scholar Hojin Yano (1893-1988) who had an important influence on the development of English literature in Taiwan.

Yano, a professor at Taipei Imperial University (now National Taiwan University) during the Japanese ruling period (1926-1945), went to Oxford University in England to study for two years in 1926, where he met Yeats. Yano left the UK in 1928 and returned to Taipei to establish a “Lecture on Western Literature”.

In 1929, Yano sought funding and planned to invite Yeats, who had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature, to lecture at the Taipei Imperial University for two years. According to the correspondence between the two, Yeats would have taught eight hours a week, earning an annual salary of £1,000, and have accommodation provided. Unfortunately, Yeats’s son was ill at the time, and his wife objected to her husband’s trip, so Yeats had to decline.

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Historians say Yeats was “relieved but disappointed” that he could not go. The reason why he was “relieved” was probably that in addition to concerns about his family’s health, the huge changes in his living environment may have also made him feel more stressed. The disappointment was due to being unable to experience Eastern culture in person, missing out on an opportunity that might become a source of creative inspiration.

However, Yeats’s works still influenced generations of Taiwanese people. My hope is that Taiwanese literature of our time can have deeper and richer interactions with Irish literature. – Yours, etc,

PIERRE TP YANG,

Taipei Representative Office in Ireland, Dublin 2.