W. B. Yeats and Chinese Modernism (for the Late Professor Daniel Albright)

Abstract

First translated and introduced to China during the May 4th Movement, W. B. Yeats has influenced Chinese literature. This paper explores the reception of Yeats by, among many, three major Chinese Modernist Schools: the Literary Research Society writers focused mainly on Yeats as a nationalist and his poetics in his earlier years; the Crescent poets turned to the later works and poetics of Yeats hailed as a high modernist; the Nine-Leaf poets attempted to absorb Yeats as a whole including his spirit of realism and his poetics of romanticism and symbolism. Not only with Yeats’s diversity and richness in his poetry but also with the different demands and literary concepts in the different phases of the Chinese New Literature Period, Yeats has played a significant role in the construction and reconstruction of Chinese Modernism.