BL. W. B. Yeats

136. Naff, William E. Review of W. B. Yeats and Japan (124), by Oshima. Comparative Literature 19 (1967): 80-83.

Finds that Yeats ‘actually made very little progress in achieving a grasp of the Oriental civilizations about which he wrote’, and turned to the ‘East’ largely as a way of ‘fleeing . . . the twentieth-century West’. Regarding Oshima’s work Naff believes it ‘humane, polished, and reflecting an extensive erudition in both European and Japanese sources’, but also argues that it suffers from an ‘implicit acceptance of the simplistic one-to-one confrontation between the “West” and the “Orient”’.