Yeats and India

Introduction

Indian philosophy is one of the ingredients which make Yeats modernist poet with his specific brand of modernism. Yeats’s modernism is rooted in a variety of sources such as nineteenth century English poetry, French symbolists, Imagism and so on so forth. Some of the major influences on his poetry include Irish mythology and folklore, European and Eastern mysticism, the occult and magic, the Caballah and Rosicrucianism, French symbolist and Romantic poetry, theosophy and Hindu philosophy. It would be useful to learn about Irish tradition’s consistent interest in and response to India and some cultural conditions that reciprocated the responses of Ireland and India.

The Celts and the Indians

Yeats was highly influenced by Shelley who in his Prometheus Unbound, says, “And the Celts knew the Indians!” Yeats himself was very much aware of this fact which finds expression in his letter to the Irish American Boston Pilot of July 1889,

“The earliest poet of India and the Irish peasant in his novel nod to each other across the ages and are in perfect agreement.”1

There are also interesting similarities in the history, mythology and the political situations of India and Ireland. These affinities facilitate the mutual literary as well as philosophical influences and the reception between the two countries.

Myles Dillon in his Celts and Aryans draws interesting parallels between Irish and Indian legends. King Cormac MacAirt, for example has an adventure similar to that of King Dushyant. Just as Dushyant meets Shankuntala, Cormac also meets Buchet, in the forest by chance and marries her. The Irish god of the dead ‘Donn’, the first to die, the father of all men and women is very similar to the Indian god of death Yama. The Irish...

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...of these concepts. He responded to them emotionally and intuitively. Besides, he was not interested in the accuracy of these concepts and modified them conveniently to suit his poetry. Yeats interpreted Christianity in terms of Indian concepts and looked at these concepts through his Irish Christian eye with sympathies for paganism.

Works Cited

1. Tuohy, Frank. Yeats. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976.p.68.

2. Lago, Mary. Ed. Imperfect Encounter. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,

1972. p.147.

3. The Ten Principal Upanishads. Trans. Shri Purohit Swami and W.B.Yeats. Calcutta: Rupa &

Co., 1992.p.34.

4. Yeats, W.B. The Collected Poems of W.B.Yeats. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1933.p.328.

5. MacNeice, Louis. The Poetry of W.B.Yeats. London: Faber and Faber, 1961.p.133.

6. Yeats, W.B. Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan, 1961.p.428.