BL. W. B. Yeats

10. ‘Art and Ideas’. New Weekly, 20 June 1914, pp. 6-7; 27 June 1914, pp. 38-40.

		Reprinted in Essays and Essays and Introductions.

In a discussion of his early circle of writers Yeats reveals that he does not share Pound’s enthusiasm for Whistler (see BK10, 11, and 76b) and his anti-academic ideas of Japanese art, but favours instead an ‘academic’ criticism ‘founded upon general ideas’; the writers in his circle, however, ‘all silently obeyed a canon that had become powerful for all the arts since Whistler, in the confidence of his American naïveté, had told everybody that Japanese painting had no literary ideas’. This essentially re-states Binyon’s criticism of Whistler’s understanding of Japanese art (see BC5 and 10), and Yeats’s language echoes both his earlier journal entry about Binyon’s work on East-Asian painting (54) and Binyon’s own Painting in the Far East (BC2). See also 25, 27a, 48, 80, 129, and 228. Reprinted in 23 and 50.